In July 1946, a short news item appeared in a New York paper. It claimed a Nazi detachment of 150 men was still holding out in Greenland, entrenched on an icy plateau northwest of Angmagssalik, about 400 miles inland. Danish Marines had supposedly been ordered to round them up, and the Germans were said to have food and equipment for at least a year. No follow-up story was ever published.
Some researchers have suggested the report was a leak, that whatever was actually happening in Greenland at that time was classified, and the story was quickly quashed before anyone could pursue it. The official record, though, says German activity in Greenland ended on October 4, 1944, when the last German weather station was captured. The Germans had tried to establish two new bases on the east coast in an operation called Edelweiss. They needed weather data as much as ever, and the Allies were equally determined to stop them.
In September 1944, Edelweiss I set out aboard the weather ship Externsteine. The US Coast Guard cutter Northland intercepted the ship and chased it for seventy miles through the ice before the Germans blew up their own vessel and surrendered. Two months later, Edelweiss II tried again. The Germans landed on Koldewey Island, but Allied radio intercepts gave away their position.
The cutter Eastwind put troops ashore, and the station was captured intact. Three officers and nine enlisted men surrendered. By 1944, the Germans had started moving their weather stations inland, well away from the coast, because the Allies were so effective at finding them on the shore. They had begun digging into the ice itself to hide from aerial observation.
One such crew, the one evacuated by a Junkers Ju 290 in 1944, had built a base in the ice on the coast while they waited for rescue. German aircraft had proven they could operate over Greenland. The Ju 290 landed on coastal ice to evacuate that weather station. The Blohm und Voss BV 222, a massive flying boat, had dropped supplies by parachute to German stations.
At least three BV 222s were held ready in northern Germany at the end of the war, and the aircraft had flown to Greenland without needing to refuel. There is precedent for a forgotten station. Germany surrendered in May 1945, but a fully manned German weather station on Svalbard was not discovered until September 1945, four months later. The Allies had simply overlooked it.
Could the same have happened in Greenland? Suppose a small German weather crew had been inserted inland, far from the coast, supplied by air from Norway. Suppose the war ended and nobody came for them. A handful of men, a working radio, enough food for a year.
It fits what we know. The report says 150 men, which is impossible for a German weather station. Those were normally staffed by one or two dozen men at most. But there is an explanation.
In the 1940s, some Inuit in eastern Greenland held sympathies for Germany. They had developed friendly ties with German scientific and polar expeditions in the 1930s, and during the war they continued to interact with German weather station personnel. One academic study noted how a German-born priest ran a seminary in Nuuk from 1934 to 1945, and the institution became a suspected focal point of Nazism in Greenland. Some seminarians were sent out among the Inuit.
In 1945, at a settlement north of Nuuk, a Danish journalist was greeted with anti-Danish sentiment and Nazi salutes, and some locals wore swastika armbands. So if a forgotten German station did exist inland in 1946, the reported 150 men were likely not German soldiers. They were probably sympathetic Inuit families camping near the small German crew. The article names Angmagssalik, now called Tasiilaq, as the location.
But in 1946, that town was the site of a US Air Force base. No German facility could have operated there for a minute. The journalist was probably based in Nuuk, which is about 400 miles from Angmagssalik as the crow flies. He was unfamiliar with Greenland’s geography and its difficult Inuit place names.
If the information had come from a US serviceman at the air base, a story about a search for Germans somewhere in the north could easily have been muddled in the retelling. But then why would anyone claim the Germans were dug in right next to an American base? It is absurd on its face. And yet that absurdity is exactly what makes it believable as a garbled version of something real.
A prankster would have chosen a more convincing location. A journalist inventing the story would have done the same. But a second-hand account passed through someone largely ignorant of Greenland and then written by a reporter who did not know better could easily end up sounding ridiculous. So the question remains.
Was there really a group of Germans still hiding on the Greenland ice cap in July 1946? The official record says no. German records from the end of the war are incomplete, destroyed, or lost on many subjects, so the absence of documentation does not settle anything. The Svalbard precedent shows the Allies could miss a station.
The German policy change to inland bases shows such a station could have existed. The aircraft capable of supplying it were operational until the final week of the war. And if it was real, why the secrecy? A forgotten weather crew is not a threat to national security.
You do not classify that. So either the report was misreporting, or a fake, or the Americans were not hunting Germans at all. Maybe they suspected something else was up there on the ice, something that justified keeping the whole affair quiet.
