On the twenty-fifth of July, 1946, a short news item appeared in the American press that made almost no sense at all. It claimed that a Nazi detachment of 150 men was still holding out in Greenland, entrenched on an icy plateau roughly 400 miles inland from the settlement of Angmagssalik. Danish Marines, the report said, had been ordered to round them up, and the Germans were believed to have food and equipment to last at least a year. The story was strange enough to be almost unbelievable, and it vanished from the papers as quickly as it had appeared.
No follow-up was ever published. Some researchers have argued that the silence meant the operation had been classified, and that the brief report had slipped out by accident before it could be suppressed. Others simply dismissed it as bad journalism. But the more I looked at it, the more I began to wonder whether there was something real buried in that odd little story.
The official history of German activity in Greenland says that it ended on the fourth of October, 1944, when the last German weather station was captured by Allied forces. That was a year and a half before the newspaper report was printed. By 1944 the Germans had tried to push two new bases onto the east coast under an operation code-named Edelweiss, because the weather data gathered from Greenland remained vital to the Third Reich. Every military plan, German or Allied, depended on knowing what the northern weather was doing.
The first attempt, Edelweiss I, was launched in September 1944 from the weather ship Externsteine. The vessel was intercepted by the American Coast Guard cutter Northland, and a chase began that stretched some seventy miles through heavy ice fields before the German ship became stuck fast. The crew blew up their own vessel and surrendered. Among the prisoners were eight officers and twenty enlisted men.
The Coast Guard had been alerted in July of that same year, when the Danish-run Greenland Sledge Patrol found evidence of a Nazi station near Cape Susi, and the operation to destroy German radio and weather reporting installations on the northeast coast got underway. Edelweiss II followed in October 1944, again aboard the Externsteine, and this time the Germans managed to land personnel and equipment on the island of Koldewey. But they were spotted from the air after radio intercepts gave away their position, and the Coast Guard cutter Eastwind put troops ashore in a dawn attack. A Focke-Wulf aircraft attached to the expedition was also sighted, veering off eastward and disappearing into the Arctic sky.
The assault on Little Koldewey Island was the northernmost engagement fought in the western hemisphere. The base itself was found intact, a fully equipped Nazi radio and weather station still transmitting valuable data back to Berlin. Three officers and nine enlisted men surrendered, and over the course of the two-month operation a total of sixty German prisoners were taken. The equipment was stripped from the base and loaded onto the Eastwind.
The mission was declared accomplished, and the northern seas closed back over with ice. On the surface, that was the end of it. The Germans had been cleared out of Greenland, and the war in Europe was over. But I had come across something that made me question whether the story of a Nazi holdout in 1946 was really as far-fetched as it seemed.
A while back I made a video about Albert Speer and his remarkable plan to escape to Greenland at the end of the war. He intended to wait there until things calmed down in Germany, and then try to rebuild his life. The story came from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who interviewed Speer after the war, as well as from Speer’s own writings. The plan called for a very large flying boat, the Blohm und Voss BV 222, to carry Speer, his family, and a group of companions to the east coast of Greenland.
From there they would establish a summer camp, with enough supplies and equipment to last them a year or more. At least three of these huge aircraft were held ready in northern Germany at the very end of the war, based close to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s headquarters at Plön. The BV 222 had already made flights to Greenland during the war without needing to refuel, so the operation was entirely feasible. In the end it never happened.
One aircraft was destroyed by Canadian Typhoon fighter-bombers, a second was damaged, and a third was blown up by its own crew on the second of May, 1945. One of the pilots, in extreme old age, spoke to reporters about the operation that had never been revealed during the war. German aircraft had flown to Greenland without serious problems late in the war. A Junkers Ju 290 had actually landed on the coastal ice off east Greenland in 1944 to evacuate a German weather station, and it returned safely to occupied Norway.
The BV 222 had also dropped supplies by parachute to German weather stations. Two large types of Luftwaffe aircraft had performed two different kinds of missions to eastern Greenland, and both had survived. So the question became whether a German weather station and its men might have been left behind at the end of the war, overlooked by everybody and simply forgotten. There was real precedent for this.
Germany surrendered on the eighth of May, 1945, but a fully manned German military weather station on the Norwegian island of Svalbard did not surrender until September 1945, four months later. The Allies simply never found them. That abandoned base still stands intact today. I have in my possession a Luftwaffe chart from 1944, captured at the end of the war and eventually thrown out of the Royal Navy’s hydrographic office.
It was rescued from a skip by a man named Martin Wakefield, who kindly gave it to me. It is a Lambert projection, the kind widely used for aeronautical charts, and it clearly shows both Svalbard and part of the coast of Greenland. The Luftwaffe used this type of projection for medium to long-range missions, including to Svalbard and to Greenland. So the capability and the precedent certainly existed.
But the newspaper report described Germans holding out hundreds of miles inland, dug into the ice cap itself. I discovered that this detail, strange as it sounded, actually fit with a policy change the German authorities had made late in the war. Because Allied forces had become so successful at finding and destroying coastal weather stations, the Germans had decided to move future bases far inland, away from the coast, where they could dig into the ice and be supplied by air from occupied Norway. So a forgotten inland station was entirely within the realm of possibility.
There was further evidence that this kind of operation could work. At least one German weather crew on the coast had built its base into the ice, which was the most effective way to protect it from aerial observation. That was the same crew flown out by the Junkers Ju 290 in 1944. The aircraft had landed on the ice successfully.
And on the Greenland ice sheet, large areas of flat, high-altitude ice suitable for landing strips still exist today and are still used for exactly that purpose. It would have been entirely feasible for a German plane to land far inland, drop off a crew and supplies, and then be resupplied later by parachute drops from something like the Blohm und Voss 222 flying out of northern Norway. That exact type of aircraft had done precisely that before. The aircraft were operational right up until the final week of the war in Europe.
Of course, all of this is speculation on my part. But intelligent speculation, based on evidence and on historical precedent, is an important part of understanding history. And in this case the evidence pointed at least to the possibility that such an operation had been real. Still, there was a serious problem with the newspaper report, and that was the number of Germans it claimed were on the ice.
One hundred and fifty men. German weather stations were normally staffed by a dozen or two dozen men at most. Why would anyone report a hundred and fifty Nazis dug in on the ice cap? I believe there is an explanation, and it comes from a strange and little-known corner of Greenland’s history.
The population of eastern Greenland in 1945 was sparse and almost entirely Inuit. In the 1940s many of these people were still hunter-gatherers. Some of the Inuit were unhappy about Danish rule and wanted some form of home rule for their island. In the 1930s they had first encountered German scientific and polar expeditions, and the Germans had established friendly relations with many of the local groups.
Heinrich Himmler’s SS Ahnenerbe research organization, the Ancestral Heritage Institute, had even studied the Inuit. During the war some Inuit continued to have contact with German weather station personnel, and they remembered these as positive exchanges. In Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, a seminary run by a German-born, German-speaking priest from 1934 to 1945 became a suspected focal point of Nazism in Greenland. Many of the seminarians were sent out to work among the Inuit.
In 1945, at the settlement of Sisimiut, about two hundred miles north of Nuuk, a Danish journalist was greeted by anti-Danish sentiment, right-arm salutes, and cries of Heil Hitler. Some locals wore swastika armbands with an upright polar bear inside the white circle instead of the usual emblem. Academics have suggested that these ideas were spread by seminarians sent north from the German-run seminary at Nuuk. I found a scholarly article by Dr.
Rebecca Jane Morgan on exactly this topic, on the spread of Nazism among Greenland’s Inuit in the 1940s. So perhaps, and I stress the word perhaps, if a forgotten German weather station was still operating deep in the interior of Greenland in 1946, the hundred and fifty so-called Nazis reported in the article may actually have been sympathetic Inuit who had camped near the small group of German personnel and been mistaken for a much larger German force. It is only a theory, but it would explain the otherwise absurd number. In summary, we have a mysterious newspaper report from a seemingly reliable source in the summer of 1946, suggesting that German personnel remained deep inside Greenland, overlooked since the end of the war more than a year earlier.
We have evidence that the Germans changed their policy in early 1945 to move weather stations far inland to avoid detection. We know they were capable of transporting stations to Greenland, landing them, supplying them by air, and even evacuating their crews in at least one case. We know that such aircraft remained operational right up to the very end of the war. We have an academic explanation for the apparently inflated number of Nazis in the report, namely Inuit families camping near the stranded Germans.
And we have a solid precedent for a military station being simply forgotten at the end of the war, the one on Svalbard that was not found until September 1945. German records from the Second World War are incomplete, lost, or destroyed on a vast number of subjects. The absence of written proof one way or another does not necessarily mean that this theory is wrong, only that the documents have not yet surfaced. But there is another important angle to consider.
If the newspaper article was genuine, and some commentators believe it offered a glimpse at a suppressed American operation in Greenland, then why would such an operation be kept secret? Discovering a forgotten German weather crew long after the war ended would be a curiosity, but hardly a matter of national security. Consider the place named in the article, Angmagssalik, now called Tasiilaq. In 1946 it was the location of an American Air Force base.
It is impossible that any German facility could have survived there for five minutes. So the journalist was clearly wrong about something. Perhaps the reporter, working from Nuuk, which is interestingly about four hundred miles from Angmagssalik as the crow flies, had muddled his information. Perhaps the source was an American serviceman from the air base at Angmagssalik who had leaked word of a search for a purported German weather station somewhere to the north.
A reporter unfamiliar with Greenland’s geography and its difficult Inuit place names could easily have garbled the details into a story about Nazis dug in near a well-known town. If the report had simply been a prank, why would anyone choose a location right next to a functioning American air base as the spot where a German force was hiding? That detail is so obviously ridiculous that it makes little sense as an invention. But it makes far more sense if the information originally came from American service personnel who were involved in some kind of search for these errant Germans, and the story had become twisted in the retelling by someone who knew almost nothing about Greenland.
So the real question stands. What was it that the Americans thought they were looking for up there on the ice? That is the part that was never explained.
The mind can only wonder what possibilities the authorities were so anxious to keep quiet.