Greenland seems to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. Based on stenographic notes from a lunchtime dialog dated Might 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anybody “ him extra in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the primary group to cross Greenland’s inside. A surviving quantity from Hitler’s non-public e book assortment comprises firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener’s Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener useless in 1930 and impressed the 1933 journey movie S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Hitler’s private copy of Historical past of the Expedition, the narrative of the tragic Wegener enterprise, could be perused within the rare-book assortment on the Library of Congress among the many 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler’s non-public library. The 198-page monograph bears his private bookplate—ex libris, eagle, swastika—like lots of the others, however is notable as a result of in contrast to most, it doesn’t embody a handwritten inscription by an creator, an in depth affiliate, or a distant admirer. This implies that the amount was a private acquisition somewhat than a present, a truth made all of the extra attention-grabbing by the 1933 publication date, the primary yr of the Hitler chancellorship, when the Nazi chief’s curiosity in Greenland transitioned from private to strategic.
By April 1934, Hitler’s authorities had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimo, 3,500 Danes, and eight,000 sheep, in addition to the world’s largest deposit of a strategic pure useful resource—cryolite, a mineral important to American aluminum manufacturing. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to discover the island’s natural world. Nevertheless, Hitler’s true intent might have been not scientific, however financial—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted numerous financial wounds on his nation over his 5 years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was a part of a broader effort to treatment one in all them.
In a drive to maneuver Germany towards financial 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 issue was that Germany used whale oil not just for margarine, a staple of the German food regimen, but in addition within the manufacturing of nitroglycerin, a key part for the munitions trade. Whale-oil imports ranged from 165,000 to 220,000 tons yearly, representing the nation’s single largest foreign-currency expenditure. To interchange Norwegian whale oil, it was proposed that “German ships with German fishermen utilizing German gear” may harvest “the riches of the ocean”—or Fischreichtum—“with out giving a single penny to overseas nations.” So Hitler mobilized a German whaling fleet that regularly depleted whale populations within the North. By 1938, the Germans additionally had 31 whale-oil-processing ships within the frozen South, off the coast of Antarctica, together with two processing stations on land provided by 257 “catcher boats.” Plans had been made to declare the “whaling enterprises” German colonial possessions.
In mid-January 1939, two twin-engine Dornier “flying boats”—mannequin Do 18-D—coursed alongside the coast of Antarctica, dropping weighted metal rods stamped with swastikas and bearing Nazi flags each 15 miles or so. The key expedition, overseen by Göring and led by Alfred Ritscher, one in all Germany’s high Arctic explorers, was meant to stake a territorial declare “similar to the enlargement of the financial pursuits of better Germany,” as Ritscher later put it.
The Antarctic demarcation venture undertaken by Ritscher in January 1939 was a part of Hitler’s aggressive peacetime land seize within the title of ethnic unification and nationwide safety, starting with the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and persevering with with the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in September of that yr.
Hitler dismissed those that opposed the acquisition of land on the grounds of human rights as “scribblers.” No divine authority dictated how a lot land a folks possessed or occupied, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “Nationwide borders are made by males, and they’re modified by males.” A rustic’s declare to territory was based mostly on its means to impose brute drive over one other, a precept that dated again, Hitler continued, to days of the “may 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, interprets as “Would possibly makes proper.”
Following the invasion of Poland, in 1939, Hitler’s pursuits within the Far North expanded from financial to army. On April 8, 1940, Hitler briefed his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, on an imminent army operation in Denmark and Norway. The preemptive strike, Hitler defined, was a defensive measure in opposition to an anticipated assault by Britain and France that he believed may come through Scandinavia. (Sweden had already declared its neutrality.) “Roughly 250,000 males will perform the operation,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Many of the artillery and ammunition have already been transported throughout, hidden in coal steamers.” The following morning, six infantry divisions, two motorized brigades, a paratrooper unit, and lots of of plane, together with 186 Heinkel bombers, launched Operation Weser Maneuver. Denmark capitulated. Norway resisted and was crushed. “As soon as we now have the 2 nations,” Goebbels recorded, “England shall be flattened” as a result of Germany may use Scandinavia as “a base of assault.” As for america? That nation “is of no curiosity to us,” Goebbels wrote, as a result of by the point the People may ship any materials help (eight months, in Goebbels’s reckoning) or put boots on the bottom in Europe (18 months), the battle can be over.
However unbeknownst to Goebbels, U.S. Coast Guard cruisers had been already on their strategy to Greenland. A strategic evaluation had decided {that a} well-directed shot from a German U-boat or an act of sabotage may cripple the cryolite-mining operations at Ivittuut, within the Arsuk Fjord in South Greenland, which America was decided to safeguard to guard its aluminum manufacturing.
Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C., distanced himself from the federal government in German-occupied Copenhagen and declared himself the consultant of “the pursuits of the free Denmark,” a standing america readily acknowledged. The American Greenland Fee was shaped, and an American consulate was opened in Godthaab, the island’s capital metropolis (at this time generally known as Nuuk), with the consent of Eske Brun, Greenland’s colonial administrator, who was an ally of Kauffmann’s. “Adaptability of areas for set up of airfields was the primary consideration governing location of forces,” Kaufmann later recalled. “Since these areas had been of the identical worth to Germany as to america, these, along with the cryolite mine, had been the localities actively defended.”
“The Eskimos in Greenland shall be astonished to see how the People are staffing their newly established consulate,” the German newspaper Schwäbischer Merkur reported on June 9, 1940, questioning the aim of the “ten officers and 167 males” that the People had dispatched to “peaceable” Greenland. “Below worldwide regulation,” the newspaper noticed, “Greenland belongs to Denmark.”
One other Nazi-aligned newspaper, Stuttgarter NS-Kurier, reminded its readers of Greenland’s standing below worldwide regulation, noting that the American presence was inflicting “critical disquiet” in Denmark: “It goes with out saying that there can’t be any speak of a change within the Danish place towards an obvious American interference within the administration of Greenland, Denmark’s final colonial holding.”
On April 9, 1941, precisely one yr 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 Settlement Between america of America and Denmark Respecting the Protection of Greenland. The preamble of the settlement highlighted the approaching hazard that Greenland “could also be transformed into some extent of aggression in opposition to nations of the American continent.” The next articles allowed america to “enhance and deepen” harbors and to “assemble, keep and function such touchdown fields, seaplane services and radio and meteorological installations as obligatory” for the safety of the North American continent in opposition to overseas aggression.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly hailed the settlement the following day. In America, Ambassador Kauffmann, because the defender of “free Denmark,” was proclaimed “king of Greenland”; in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, he was charged with treason.
On April 27, Danish Overseas Minister Erik Scavenius, claiming to behave on directions from the Danish king, issued a formal notice to Hull protesting Kauffmann’s actions. By signing the bilateral settlement, Scavenius wrote, Kauffmann had acted “in opposition to the need and information of His Majesty,” in addition to in opposition to the “Cupboard and the Danish Rigsdag,” the equal of the U.S. Congress. “From actual in addition to from formal factors of view,” Scavenius wrote, “the Danish Authorities has subsequently been obliged to think about the settlement as invalid in level of Danish constitutional in addition to worldwide regulation.” For america to have entered into an settlement with “an individual who has no nation and no head of state behind him” was, Scavenius wrote, “a fiction.”
If that’s the case, this fiction was just like the one the British authorities had endorsed a yr earlier, after Germany had invaded France and put in the collaborationist Vichy regime. In June 1940, a 49-year-old colonel who had led the French military’s 4th Armored Division in counterattacks in opposition to the Germans at Abbeville retreated to London after France surrendered. The British acknowledged the colonel, Charles de Gaulle, because the self-declared consultant of the “free French”; the Vichy authorities denounced de Gaulle as a traitor and deserter, stripping him of his army rank, convicting him of treason, and sentencing him to demise in absentia.
The People, just like the British, acknowledged the excellence between a fascist takeover by drive and the prerogatives of a democratically elected authorities. So simply as de Gaulle was acknowledged because the respectable consultant of France, Kauffman was acknowledged because the respectable consultant of Denmark and Greenland. Over the following 4 years, Greenland turned a significant transit level for the Allies—it had as many as 17 army services, together with airfields and naval installations that protected the cryolite-mining operation at Ivittuut—and assisted within the liberation of lots of of thousands and thousands of Europeans throughout the continent. When the battle was over and the democratically elected authorities in Denmark was restored, it willingly reaffirmed this American safety within the 1951 Protection of Greenland settlement, which stays in impact at this time.
