Schatzgraeber: The Nazi's Secret Arctic Base

Nazis. Secret bases. The occult. Polar bears. Let’s go!

You may be forgiven for thinking that this will be the plot for a forthcoming Indiana Jones movie, maybe one where a geriatric Indie shuffles across a frozen tundra to discover a secret Nazi base buried under the Arctic wastes. He finds the Spear of Destiny somewhere which he later uses to fend off a polar bear. Or maybe not. Anyway, just the mention of secret bases anywhere is pretty exciting, and tagging the word “Nazi” on to it just opens the door for way more questions.

So was there really a Nazi base somewhere in the Arctic circle? Yes, there was. What were they doing there? Well, therein lies the mystery so let’s go over what we actually know and then take a more speculative expedition into the unknown.

Whatever the Weather

When invading and defending your country from the land, sea and air, it probably helps to have a good handle on what the weather’s doing. You want to avoid thunderstorms if you’re planning a naval operation, for example, or heavy winds during bombing raids. You could also use bad weather to your advantage for masking convoy movements.

During the second world war, this was a big advantage to have, so enemy weather stations were high-value targets. The Allied troops had a big jump on the German army when it came to weather intelligence as weather stations were available all across the north Atlantic from Canada to Greenland to Iceland and Great Britain. This meant that the Allies had quite advanced and accurate knowledge of upcoming weather fronts that they could use to time their operations more successfully.

There was also a fleet of weather ships established in the Atlantic, mainly run by the United States, with over 20 reporting back on conditions across the ocean by 1945. These ships were so useful in their collection of data that a lot were kept on for several decades after the war, the last weather ship finally being decommissioned in 2010.

Germany tried to get onto the weather ship train but most of their tiny fleet was destroyed quite quickly so they had to resort to using regular small fishing ships to gain any intelligence.

The German army did send U-boats further north to gain meteorological information and also used planes, but the planes made for easy targets and the U-boats were also limited in the amount of weather data they could receive and send. Physical weather stations would be a much better bet for the Germans but because of the geographical location of Germany compared with the Allies, it wasn’t easy to get weather stations built anywhere where a) they would be useful and b) they could do it without being spotted.

But it seems that they did manage to do it and do it pretty successfully because while there were rumours about a secret base somewhere in the Arctic circle, it wasn’t until the mid 1950s that word of its existence even came out.

Schatzgräber

Have you heard of a place called Alexandra Land? No, it’s not a place full of people called Alexandra, it’s an island that now belongs to Russia and sits 620 miles, or just shy of a thousand kilometres, away from the North Pole. Confusingly, there’s also an AlexandER Land which is near the South Pole but we’re not talking about that one right now so let’s keep all our attention towards the north.

When it became clear that Germany was falling behind in the weather prediction department, Hitler gave direct orders for land-based weather stations to be set up somewhere in the Arctic circle. In 1943, the small station was set up on the partly glaciered-over and otherwise pretty deserted island of Alexandra Land, which is about 650 miles or 1,100 kilometres north of the main Russian coast. This was apparently going to be the first in a whole network of weather stations dotted about the Arctic circle and the initial team sent to Alexandra Land consisted of around 10 people, including meteorologists, radio technicians and other odd job people.

The team, and therefore the base, operated under the name “Schatzgräber”. It was usual at the time for operations like this to be named after the team leader but this seems to have been ignored here. It is possible that it was named after someone called Heinrich Schatz who was going to be the leader for another weather station team but I only saw this in passing.

“Schatzgräber” translates literally to “treasure digger” and the popular translation is given as “treasure hunter” which seems like a weird codename to give to a small station that’s all about collecting weather data. Sure, it might have been assigned totally at random or it could have been a play on Schatz’s surname but from what we know about the Nazis and about Hitler’s interests in particular, it definitely hints at a search with a treasure or goal in mind. But what kind of thing are we talking about?

Why would the location of the base be of any significance? Is this some sort of Indiana Jones thing after all? Well…maybe.

Norse Code

As well as being a political party, the Nazi party was into all kinds of weird stuff ideologically, religiously and just in general. One of the things it’s most remembered for is its obsession with a master race of humans, although if I had been Hitler, I might have swung some of the idealized characteristics to be ones that I actually possessed rather than going on about how everyone should aspire to look the complete opposite of myself. Just a thought.

The aim of the game was to get people fitting the description to reproduce. This would eventually form this so-called superior race and the other aim was to kill off any group not fitting into the criteria of tall, slim, light-skinned, light haired people with good chins. One existing group that was already considered to contain optimum specimens was the Nordic race, with the best of the best being found in Norway and Sweden.

Swedes apparently had blood that was over 80% Nordic while Norwegians contained around 80% Nordic goodness. I don’t really know how these numbers were arrived at, they may have just looked at a few photos of various nationalities and gone: “yeah, I’d say they look around 80% Nordic, don’t you think?” “What about these guys?

50%?” “Ehhh, his chin’s quite good, let’s say 55.”

Anyway, the point I’m trying to get to is that Hitler and the Nazi party co-opted and then twisted Norse and Viking mythology, symbols and history to fit into and falsely legitimize the Third Reich’s ideas of racial purity. There are signs of Old Norse imagery and symbols all over the place, from the familiar “SS” logo which is two “sig” runes that the Nazis changed the meaning of to now mean “victory”, to the ultimate Nazi image of the swastika which was, amongst other things, originally a symbol depicting Norse god Thor’s hammer and the sun. Hitler was trying to imbue his army with the power the runes signified but because all the meanings had been changed to suit their own purposes, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. I found an article called “No Nazis in Valhalla” by Lena Nighswander in the International ResearchScape Journal which included this useful information:

In changing the meaning, the association of the symbols changes. There is already power to be found in Norse symbolism, but it is found within the original Nordic context; a German soldier wielding the sigel rune on his SS uniform has his own power, but the power’s source is no longer Norse. Instead, the source is now the constructed German meaning in the shell of what once was Norse.

I mean, if you really could harness runic power into natty little uniform badges, armies from every country would be covered in them.

The Third Reich’s favourite musician, Wagner, was also a big fan of Norse mythology, with it being a huge inspiration behind his famous opera, the “Ring” cycle. Nighswander goes on to say:

Through adaptation, Wagner created a Germanized portrait of Norse myth that was easily palatable to the Nazi cause, transmissible through performance, and likely to be claimed as culture by the common person. This sort of appropriation of Norse myth as German culture, particularly high German culture, only serves to add esteem to the rampant ideas of Nordicism that were so heavily valued by Hitler and his comrades during this time.

So, yeah, Hitler was head over heels for anything Norse or Nordic at this point. So what’s any of this got to do with the blooming treasure hunter thing you might be asking? Well, it has been rumoured that far from just being a weather station and small base for U-boats to check in at, Schatzgräber was also a cover for archeological excavations to find artifacts relating to the Norse myths the Third Reich was so in love with.

Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, set up a special research group in 1935 called the “Ahnenerbe” which translates to “ancestral heritage” which did all kinds of weird stuff to try and prove Germans were somehow descended from the Aryan race which may or may not have come from Atlantis. Yes, that Atlantis. The Ahnenerbe conducted experiments on humans, dove deep into mysticism and the occult and searched far and wide for historical artifacts which actually sounds pretty cool apart from the human experiments thing and the fact that all this was carried out by a bunch of far-right nut jobs.

They were also trying to rewrite history by claiming that everything was basically created by Nordic people and that the Nordic writing system was the oldest one in the world etc. etc. They spent a lot of time combing through literature from places like Iceland which was seen as a focal point for Viking and Nordic history. Coming across mentions of Thor’s hammer in poetic texts seemed to make Himmler believe that the hammer was actually real and that whoever found it would have an extremely powerful weapon.

He wrote this letter to his team in 1940:

Have the following researched: Find all places in the northern Germanic Aryan cultural world where an understanding of the lightning bolt, the thunderbolt, Thor’s hammer, or the flying or thrown hammer exists, in addition to all the sculptures of the god depicted with a small hand-axe emitting lightning. Please collect all of the pictorial, sculptural, written and mythological evidence of this. I am convinced that this is not based on natural thunder and lightning, but rather that it is an early, highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers, which was only, of course, possessed by the Aesir, the gods, and that it implies an unheard of knowledge of electricity.

That Himmler, eh? Wants the moon on a stick, that guy! At least he said “please”.

So could the Schatzgräber team have really been on the lookout for Thor’s hammer, aka “Mjöllnir”, or any other Norse stuff? Maybe they were also interested in mythological artifacts from other arctic cultures. Could they also have been building some sort of secret weapon?

Perhaps they feared they were all going to be on the naughty list so were planning to kidnap Santa. Well, who knows. It’s certainly possible that members of the Ahnenerbe think tank were part of the Schatzgräber group and excavations could easily have been carried out as the whole island was deserted so they could really do whatever they wanted with no-one else around.

The purported weather station was totally abandoned in 1944 which was a weird time to leave it as Russia was launching major offensive operations so it would have been useful to have as much meteorological information as possible during this period.

The whole end to the Schatzgräber operation is quite the comedy of errors, actually. The people stationed there were supplied with food drops by plane and U-boat but evidently things were getting scarce as they were way out in the middle of nowhere so one night they decided to tuck into some yummy polar bear meat. And not just any old polar bear meat, some severely undercooked polar bear meat that was full of worms!

To cut a long and uncomfortable story short, they all got Trichinosis from roundworms in the bear meat. This would be horrible at the best of times but they were all stuck on a freezing island in the Arctic ocean with any hope of rescue or treatment several days’ travel away. Eventually a plane was sent to treat the sick men and a doctor was supposed to parachute down to assess the situation but it was his first parachute jump so the pilot thought he’d make it easy on him and land instead but ended up botching it and damaging the plane.

By this point some of the ill men were actually delirious and hallucinating but everyone then had to wait for a u-boat to pick them all up or for the plane to be repaired as I’ve seen varying endings to the story. The only team member sitting pretty was the one vegetarian in the group.

It does seem strange that the place was totally abandoned and left to the elements after this episode of food poisoning. As the team was in regular contact with the German forces, it wouldn’t have been hard to rotate other people in, unless whatever they were actually doing was so skilled and specific that they were the only 10 people in the country who could have done it. And that doesn’t seem likely for just taking weather readings.

And why was the place kept so hush-hush that no-one found out about it until 1953? This is kind of a rhetorical question as I really have no idea but it seems that no-one was sure if the place even existed until the Soviets started using Alexandra Land themselves in the 50s. But it seemed that their outings to the island didn’t last long either as it wasn’t until 2016 when weather conditions were at their most favourable in years that some Russian scientists located the remains of the Schatzgräber base and set about documenting and photographing them.

They apparently found over 600 items including books and papers in German and things stamped with swastikas and symbols of the German Wehrmacht, making it pretty much certain that the Nazis did indeed have something set up there. Any buildings or structures have long since fallen in and been demolished by the harsh weather and the intervening decades and in reality, the only things the explorers found seem to relate to boring old weather station stuff and general supplies. They haven’t found any electricity-harnessing hammers… or maybe they did and they’re just not telling anyone.

So while it’s fun to think that there might have been ulterior projects going on near the North Pole, there isn’t any evidence left that this was the case. Boo! But in quite an interesting parallel, there were also rumours of a secret German base…near the South Pole.

The Nazis Go South

Oh yes, rumours of strange Nazi goings-on in the Antarctic have also filtered down through the years, stemming from an expedition that set out in 1938. According to the theories, the Germans made it to Antarctica and claimed a portion of it for themselves. They then started work on a network of bunkers below the ice which came in handy after the end of the war in 1945 when Nazi leaders fled to Antarctica until such a time as they felt it was safe to reemerge.

A couple of U-boats popping up in Argentina shortly after the end of the war helped to fuel rumours that Hitler et al had managed to escape and were dropped off and currently holed up somewhere in Antarctica. There was also an alternative suggestion that it was Hitler’s ashes that were transported down there and hidden away with other Nazi loot. Unfortunately for the conspiracy minded among us, there isn’t much holding this theory up.

There has been no evidence found of any large or small-scale secret bunker in Antarctica and the expedition that set out there in 1938 spent only a month conducting their research before heading back which wouldn’t have been enough time to do much excavating. The U-boat commanders and their crew that turned up in Argentina were all apparently arrested and questioned but it was eventually decided that nobody of special note had been on the subs. The Nazis did manage to leave traces of their regime on the frozen continent, however, and it is a pretty good story.

It all starts with whale oil, tasty, tasty whale oil.

Neu Schwabenland

As mentioned a second ago, there was a German ship that set out for Antarctica on the down-low in December 1938. The reason for their mission was to scout out Antarctica in order to build a base there for producing whale oil. Hitler was trying to rely less on other countries, such as Norway, to provide Germany with all the yummy oil-based products they liked. This was to save money and also to ensure a supply if trading was ever cut off for some reason like, I don’t know, a massive world war starting or something. Good planning there, Adolf! Apparently Germans loved that crappy alternative to butter, margarine, and couldn’t get enough of it. It was still made with whale oil at the time and the sheer amount the Germans used was enough to necessitate a whole operation to be set up in the Antarctic. Well, they used it for other stuff too but honestly they ate a lot of margarine. Why would this production plant be so far away, you might think? Well, while commercial whaling wasn’t outlawed until the mid 1980s, the poor whales were already getting a bit stretched in the 1930s so as the Germans had to go farther and farther away to find any, the Antarctic base seemed like a good idea. Anyway, the ship was called Schwabenland and it set sail full of scientists, officers and one Nazi official as per policy. Taking a look at the captain seems to knock the whole secret bunker thinking on the head from the start as he was chosen for gasp his experience and knowledge rather than to spearhead any sort of Third Reich escape plan. His name was Alfred Ritscher and as well as having previous polar exploration experience, he was also married to a Jewish artist, although I did also see that they got divorced in 1934 to ensure his military career wasn’t affected so that sucks. Moving on, the Schwabenland reached Antarctica about a month later in January 1939 and started exploring a supposedly unclaimed bit of land which they very originally named “Neu-Schwabenland”, after the boat. Wow. must have been a great boat. In a strange side story, one of the reconnaissance planes flying over the area was running low on fuel and had to start throwing out cargo to make itself lighter. Included in the hastily jettisoned items were apparently a couple of boxes that were filled with small metal swastikas that were meant to be spread over the area anyway to bag it for the Nazis. I don’t know how legally sound that is but if I was in a remote area and happened upon a patch of land covered in tiny swastikas I’d probably start heading the other way pretty sharpish. So yeah, apparently there are little Nazi symbols scattered about on the glaciers for all eternity like tiny hate sprinkles on a big frozen cake. After they’d mapped a lot of the Antarctic land, the Schwabenland set off home and also managed to discover the Mid-Atlantic Ridge volcanoes on the way back although they weren’t called that until a while later.

So there you go - were Nazis ever at the poles? Yes! They made it relatively close to both the north and south poles just before or during world war 2. Did they build secret bases there?

Sort of! There was a base on Alexandra Land that no-one knew about until a good few years after the war. While its purpose was probably as a weather station, there are a couple of questions with timing and why it was just abandoned wholesale that could potentially point to some other undercover shenanigans, although nothing concrete has come to light yet. The name “Schatzgräber” translating to “treasure hunter” is kind of exciting and really does tie in to the kind of side missions that Hitler and his crew were obsessed with but unfortunately for us, no treasures were uncovered, or at least, none that we know of.

There was definitely a German expedition to Antarctica but this was for research and mapping purposes, not to build secret bunkers. There wasn’t enough time to have done any of that and there has been lots more mapping and building on Antarctica since then and nothing’s ever been found.

Who knows, if it hadn’t been for that worm-riddled polar bear, maybe the Schatzgräber team would have eventually found the proof that they were descended from Atlanteans or the location of Thor’s hammer but then again, probably not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the purpose of the Nazi base Schatzgräber?

The primary purpose of the Nazi base Schatzgräber was to serve as a weather station in the Arctic circle, providing meteorological information to support German military operations.

Where was the Schatzgräber base located?

The Schatzgräber base was located on Alexandra Land, an island about 620 miles away from the North Pole, which now belongs to Russia.

What does the name ‘Schatzgräber’ mean?

The name ‘Schatzgräber’ translates literally to ‘treasure digger’ and is popularly translated as ‘treasure hunter’.

What happened to the team stationed at Schatzgräber?

The team at Schatzgräber contracted Trichinosis from eating undercooked polar bear meat, leading to their evacuation and the eventual abandonment of the base.

What was the Ahnenerbe and what was its connection to Schatzgräber?

The Ahnenerbe was a Nazi research group focused on proving the superiority of the Aryan race. There are rumors that members of the Ahnenerbe might have been part of the Schatzgräber team, possibly conducting archaeological excavations for Norse artifacts.

What was the significance of the Nazi expedition to Antarctica?

The Nazi expedition to Antarctica in 1938 was primarily for research and mapping purposes, aiming to establish a base for producing whale oil. The expedition did not build secret bunkers as some theories suggest.

What was the name of the German ship that explored Antarctica?

The German ship that explored Antarctica was named Schwabenland. The expedition mapped a portion of the continent and named it Neu-Schwabenland.

Why was the Schatzgräber base abandoned?

The Schatzgräber base was abandoned after the team contracted Trichinosis from eating undercooked polar bear meat, leading to their evacuation. The base was left to the elements and was not reoccupied by the Germans.

What did Russian scientists find at the Schatzgräber site in 2016?

In 2016, Russian scientists found over 600 items at the Schatzgräber site, including books, papers, and supplies stamped with swastikas and symbols of the German Wehrmacht, confirming the Nazi presence.

What was the significance of the name ‘Neu-Schwabenland’?

The name ‘Neu-Schwabenland’ was given to a portion of Antarctica mapped by the German expedition in 1938. The name translates to ‘New Schwabenland,’ named after the ship Schwabenland that conducted the expedition.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Schatzgraeber: The Nazi’s Secret Arctic Base
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.