Hitler’s Greenland Obsession

Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. A surviving volume from Hitler’s private book collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener’s Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930 and inspired the 1933 adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Hitler’s personal copy of History of the Expedition, the narrative of the tragic Wegener venture, can be perused in the rare-book collection at the Library of Congress among the 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler’s private library. The 198-page monograph bears his personal bookplate—ex libris, eagle, swastika—like many of the others, but is notable because unlike most, it does not include a handwritten inscription by an author, a close associate, or a distant admirer. This suggests that the volume was a personal acquisition rather than a gift, a fact made all the more interesting by the 1933 publication date, the first year of the Hitler chancellorship, when the Nazi leader’s interest in Greenland transitioned from personal to strategic.

[From the May 2003 issue: Hitler’s forgotten library]

By April 1934, Hitler’s government had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimo, 3,500 Danes, and 8,000 sheep, as well as the world’s largest deposit of a strategic natural resource—cryolite, a mineral essential to American aluminum production. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted countless economic wounds on his country over his five years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was part of a broader effort to remedy one of them.

In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry. Whale-oil imports ranged from 165,000 to 220,000 tons annually, representing the country’s single largest foreign-currency expenditure. To replace Norwegian whale oil, it was proposed that “German ships with German fishermen using German equipment” could harvest “the riches of the sea”—or Fischreichtum—“without giving a single penny to foreign countries.” So Hitler mobilized a German whaling fleet that gradually depleted whale populations in the North. By 1938, the Germans also had 31 whale-oil-processing ships in the frozen South, off the coast of Antarctica, along with two processing stations on land supplied by 257 “catcher boats.” Plans were made to declare the “whaling enterprises” German colonial possessions.

[Read: Hitler’s terrible tariffs]

In mid-January 1939, two twin-engine Dornier “flying boats”—model Do 18-D—coursed along the coast of Antarctica, dropping weighted steel rods stamped with swastikas and bearing Nazi flags every 15 miles or so. The secret expedition, overseen by Göring and led by Alfred Ritscher, one of Germany’s top Arctic explorers, was intended to stake a territorial claim “corresponding to the expansion of the economic interests of greater Germany,” as Ritscher later put it.

The Antarctic demarcation project undertaken by Ritscher in January 1939 was part of Hitler’s aggressive peacetime land grab in the name of ethnic unification and national security, beginning with the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and continuing with the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in September of that year.

Hitler dismissed those who opposed the acquisition of land on the grounds of human rights as “scribblers.” No divine authority dictated how much land a people possessed or occupied, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “National borders are made by men, and they are changed by men.” A country’s claim to territory was based on its ability to impose brute force over another, a principle that dated back, Hitler continued, to days of the “might of a victorious sword,” when Germanic tribes asserted themselves with blood and iron. “Und nur in dieser Kraft allein liegt dann das Recht,” Hitler wrote, a maxim that, distilled into English, translates as “Might makes right.”

Following the invasion of Poland, in 1939, Hitler’s interests in the Far North expanded from economic to military. On April 8, 1940, Hitler briefed his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, on an imminent military operation in Denmark and Norway. The preemptive strike, Hitler explained, was a defensive measure against an anticipated attack by Britain and France that he believed might come via Scandinavia. (Sweden had already declared its neutrality.) “Approximately 250,000 men will carry out the operation,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Most of the artillery and ammunition have already been transported across, hidden in coal steamers.” The next morning, six infantry divisions, two motorized brigades, a paratrooper unit, and hundreds of aircraft, including 186 Heinkel bombers, launched Operation Weser Maneuver. Denmark capitulated. Norway resisted and was crushed. “Once we have the two countries,” Goebbels recorded, “England will be flattened” because Germany could use Scandinavia as “a base of attack.” As for the United States? That country “is of no interest to us,” Goebbels wrote, because by the time the Americans could deliver any material assistance (eight months, in Goebbels’s reckoning) or put boots on the ground in Europe (18 months), the war would be over.

But unbeknownst to Goebbels, U.S. Coast Guard cruisers were already on their way to Greenland. A strategic analysis had determined that a well-directed shot from a German U-boat or an act of sabotage could cripple the cryolite-mining operations at Ivittuut, in the Arsuk Fjord in South Greenland, which America was determined to safeguard to protect its aluminum production.

Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C., distanced himself from the government in German-occupied Copenhagen and declared himself the representative of “the interests of the free Denmark,” a status the United States readily recognized. The American Greenland Commission was formed, and an American consulate was opened in Godthaab, the island’s capital city (today known as Nuuk), with the consent of Eske Brun, Greenland’s colonial administrator, who was an ally of Kauffmann’s. “Adaptability of areas for installation of airfields was the first consideration governing location of forces,” Kaufmann later recalled. “Since these areas were of the same value to Germany as to the United States, these, in addition to the cryolite mine, were the localities actively defended.”

“The Eskimos in Greenland will be astonished to see how the Americans are staffing their newly established consulate,” the German newspaper Schwäbischer Merkur reported on June 9, 1940, questioning the purpose of the “ten officers and 167 men” that the Americans had dispatched to “peaceful” Greenland. “Under international law,” the newspaper observed, “Greenland belongs to Denmark.”

Another Nazi-aligned newspaper, Stuttgarter NS-Kurier, reminded its readers of Greenland’s status under international law, noting that the American presence was causing “serious disquiet” in Denmark: “It goes without saying that there cannot be any talk of a change in the Danish position toward an apparent American interference in the administration of Greenland, Denmark’s last colonial holding.”

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

On April 9, 1941, exactly one year after the German occupation of Denmark, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Kauffmann, with the assent of the Greenland colonial administrator, signed the Agreement Between the United States of America and Denmark Respecting the Defense of Greenland. The preamble of the agreement highlighted the imminent danger that Greenland “may be converted into a point of aggression against nations of the American continent.” The subsequent articles allowed the United States to “improve and deepen” harbors and to “construct, maintain and operate such landing fields, seaplane facilities and radio and meteorological installations as necessary” for the protection of the North American continent against foreign aggression.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly hailed the agreement the next day. In America, Ambassador Kauffmann, as the defender of “free Denmark,” was proclaimed “king of Greenland”; in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, he was charged with treason.

On April 27, Danish Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, claiming to act on instructions from the Danish king, issued a formal note to Hull protesting Kauffmann’s actions. By signing the bilateral agreement, Scavenius wrote, Kauffmann had acted “against the will and knowledge of His Majesty,” as well as against the “Cabinet and the Danish Rigsdag,” the equivalent of the U.S. Congress. “From real as well as from formal points of view,” Scavenius wrote, “the Danish Government has therefore been obliged to consider the agreement as invalid in point of Danish constitutional as well as international law.” For the United States to have entered into an agreement with “a person who has no country and no head of state behind him” was, Scavenius wrote, “a fiction.”

If so, this fiction was similar to the one the British government had endorsed a year earlier, after Germany had invaded France and installed the collaborationist Vichy regime. In June 1940, a 49-year-old colonel who had led the French army’s 4th Armored Division in counterattacks against the Germans at Abbeville retreated to London after France surrendered. The British recognized the colonel, Charles de Gaulle, as the self-declared representative of the “free French”; the Vichy government denounced de Gaulle as a traitor and deserter, stripping him of his military rank, convicting him of treason, and sentencing him to death in absentia.

The Americans, like the British, recognized the distinction between a fascist takeover by force and the prerogatives of a democratically elected government. So just as de Gaulle was recognized as the legitimate representative of France, Kauffman was recognized as the legitimate representative of Denmark and Greenland. Over the next four years, Greenland became a vital transit point for the Allies—it had as many as 17 military facilities, including airfields and naval installations that protected the cryolite-mining operation at Ivittuut—and assisted in the liberation of hundreds of millions of Europeans across the continent. When the war was over and the democratically elected government in Denmark was restored, it willingly reaffirmed this American protection in the 1951 Defense of Greenland agreement, which remains in effect today.