In the stenographic notes of a lunch on May 21, 1942, Adolf Hitler confided that few figures had fascinated him as much in his youth as that of Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who crossed the interior of Greenland in 1888. The island of the Great North nourished in the future Führer an imagination of exploration and conquest and he took a close interest in it once he came to power.
From April 1934, the Nazi regime recorded Greenland: 13,500 “Eskimos”, 3,500 Danes, 8,000 sheep and, above all, the largest known deposit of a key strategic mineral: cryolite, essential for the production of aluminum, and therefore for war planes. In 1938, Hermann Göring, Minister of Forests and Aviation of the Third Reich, sent an expedition to the island – officially to study the flora and fauna – but entrusted to a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, veteran of a previous mission, the Wegener expedition.
This movement towards the north is part of a broader context: the economic headlong rush of a Reich that Adolf Hitler claims to make self-sufficient through punitive tariffs, failure to pay the foreign debt and a reduction in Norwegian imports of whale oil. Problem: this oil is not only used in the composition of margarine, essential to the German diet, but also in the manufacture of nitroglycerin and therefore explosives.
Germany then imports 165,000 to 220,000 tonnes of whale oil per year, its heaviest foreign exchange spending sector. And Adolf Hitler demands that “German ships with German fishermen using German equipment” exploit the “riches of the sea” without pouring “only one pfennig abroad”recalls the American monthly magazine The Atlantic.
Result: a German whaling fleet set sail, first into the North Atlantic, then off the coast of Antarctica, where in 1938-1939 the Third Reich deployed thirty-one factory ships, two on-shore processing stations and 257 hunter boats, with the barely veiled idea of transforming these installations into colonial possessions.
The law of the strongest
These ambitions are part of Adolf Hitler’s desire for “preventive” conquests: Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in September, then, after the invasion of Poland, extension of its ambitions from the South Pole to the Far North. In My Kampfhe rejects the humanitarian scruples of those who oppose annexations and asserts that “national borders are made by men and they are changed by men”. In short, he will take by force what he considers necessary for the survival of “Greater Germany”.
After 1939, Greenland ceased to be solely about minerals and became a military issue. On April 8, 1940, Adolf Hitler explained to Joseph Goebbels that he was preparing to launch an offensive in Norway and Denmark to forestall a British and French attack that could come through Scandinavia. In his diary, Goebbels notes that“around 250,000 men” must participate in the operation, with cannons and ammunition already hidden in coal cargo ships. Once these two countries were occupied, “England will be crushed” thanks to Scandinavian attack bases.
A strategic location
Unbeknownst to the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, American coast guard cruisers were already heading towards Greenland: a strategic analysis showed that a single German submarine or sabotage would be enough to paralyze the Ivittuut cryolite mine, which the United States considers intolerable for its aluminum production.
On April 9, 1941, exactly one year after the German occupation of Denmark, the United States signed a decree with exiled Danish representatives, aimed at strengthening the American presence in Greenland in the form of ports, airfields, naval installations, radios and weather stations to prevent the island from becoming “a point of aggression against the nations of the American continent.” Rhetoric that should remind you of something.
Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly welcomed this text, while the government of occupied Denmark declared this text obsolete, having not been signed by any official member of the collaboration government.
The United States, like the United Kingdom with Charles de Gaulle, chooses to distinguish a fascist dispossession from a legitimate democratic government and Greenland is therefore officially considered an advanced post. Up to seventeen military installations, including airfields and naval bases, were built to protect the cryolite mine from possible German attack. Structures which will serve as relays in the battle for the liberation of Europe, before a new defense agreement signed in 1951 perpetuates this American presence, still in force today.
