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The last of Hitler’s army to surrender were stationed in a desolate arctic wasteland—a key vantage point in the little-known WWII battle over forecasting the weather.
The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is one of the most remote places on earth—more than 500 miles north of Europe, and about as far from the North Pole, it was entirely uninhabited by humans until the late 19th century, aside for a few early attempts by whalers to overwinter that mostly ended in disaster. The original name for this archipelago was “Spitsbergen,” translated from Dutch it means simply “pointy mountains,” and from the distance of a ship at sea, that’s all one sees here: jagged, snow-capped mountains spaced apart by glaciers that push their way between them towards the sea.
Only on land do you see there’s more: flocks of seabirds, including fulmars, skuas, and auks, and in summer the bright splotches of orange and purple from the lichen that grows here. Mines were first established here in the early 20th century, but now tourism dominates, as the islands’ pristine, placid emptiness draws people from all over the world.
I’d come in the summer of 2024, part of The Arctic Circle artist residency, which brings writers and artists from all over the world to Svalbard each year. Surrounded by snow-capped peaks, a group of us hiked over a low ridge and came upon a small, flat plain, dotted with rusted wreckage on the west side of the main and only inhabited island. A bale of shredded wire, half-submerged in the silt. A warped and deformed metal jug. Snarled spans of metal, none more than a foot or so long, all bright orange from the rust of decades. Every so often, a shard of pottery. The detritus covered a circular area maybe a hundred feet in diameter, and I carefully picked my way through it—touching nothing, disturbing nothing.
It could have been anything: the remains of a plane crash or an abandoned trapper’s hut. Without the relics being interpreted by guides, it would have been difficult to understand that these were traces of a prolonged conflict. I was walking among the remains of a Nazi weather station built in 1942, codenamed Nussbaum, one of the last remnants of a strange and forgotten battle fought far above the civilized world.
Silent and inert, these ruins told a story of how this land was once used for war—and perhaps, how, in the not-too-distant future, it might one day be used again.
The Allied Forces and the Nazis wage a weather war in the Arctic
Svalbard seems an unlikely focal point for conflict. For centuries it was considered terra nullis, land belonging to no one. That changed with the Svalbard Treaty of 1925, which recognized the archipelago as Norwegian sovereignty but gave all signatories equal access to any natural resources, primarily coal. Only two nations have built permanent mining settlements here: Norway, who established two in the first decades of the 20th century, and Russia, which also maintains two settlements that it established in the 1920s while it was still the Soviet Union.
The entire archipelago is, at least theoretically, open to all, and Svalbard has long existed as a kind of liminal space beyond nationhood: One doesn’t need a visa to visit there or work in Svalbard, for example, and pregnant women in their second trimester must return to the mainland because anyone born there would technically have no citizenship. It’s a place that feels beyond nations and beyond politics, a land of barren, stark simplicity where survival takes precedent over petty squabbles, a place with very little beyond snow and rock to care about anyway.
But war inverts priorities—people and things that once had value now become useless or become merely collateral damage, while places and things that once were empty can now resonate with strategic value. Before World War II, this place had been envisioned as something of a laboratory of how different, competing states, could all equally participate in arctic exploration and mining. That experiment came to an abrupt and violent halt with the outbreak of World War II, when rival powers realized that the archipelago could be a key strategic asset.
Far removed from the theaters of war, Svalbard nonetheless offered advantages, less for its strategic value than for its importance in predicting weather in Europe, much of which originates in the polar regions. Weather reports were invaluable for both ship captains and pilots waging war across the European continent, particularly for the Soviets.
In 1941, Allied forces discovered their uncoded weather reports sent from Svalbard were being intercepted and used by German forces, and the British, Russian and free Norwegian authorities all agreed to dismantle operations in the archipelago, so that, in the words of the British admiralty, the Germans could “get no advantage out of Spitsbergen […].” Operation Gauntlet, launched on August 25, 1941, was an Allied combined operation to destroy the island’s coal mines, air strips, and, most importantly, its meteorological stations, ensuring that the Nazis couldn’t capitalize on the weather reports.
The operation went off without a hitch, but almost immediately Germany realized that the Allied weather reports had stopped and set out to establish its own weather bases in the high arctic. They landed small crews and established a weather base in Adventfjorden, on the southern side of the archipelago, near the main settlements. A second, more remote base, named Nussbaum, was up and running by that October.
Aware that the Germans had reestablished weather stations there, the Norwegians proposed retaking the island in the summer of 1942. Reconnaissance flights suggested it was minimally inhabited, and that recapturing it would not entail a military presence. On May 13, two ships, including the Arctic icebreaker Isbjørn and the sealer Selis reached Svalbard under the command of Einar Sverdrup, CEO of Store Norske, the coal mining company that operated in Svalbard. Sverdrup had volunteered for the mission, offering up his knowledge of the region—he did not have a military background, but the operation was considered largely an economic venture.
It was a fatal miscalculation.
While breaking through the ice in the harbor, both ships were set upon by four long-range Luftwaffe bombers, FW 200 Condors, which attacked. The high walls of the fjords, with their towering, snow-covered mountains, reduced the Norwegians’ visibility, and they did not see the threat until the Condors were already upon them. Both ships were hit: the Isbjørn sank almost immediately, while the Selis caught fire and was soon crippled. Thirteen Norwegians were killed outright, including Sverdrup, and of the nine wounded, two would later die of their injuries. The remaining 60 retreated to Barentsburg, which had been stocked with supplies.
The Allies responded later that summer with a second attempt to retake the island. This time, they were prepared for war. On June 25, the cruiser HMS Manchester, accompanied by the destroyer HMS Eclipse, reached the island. By now, the Adventfjorden base was unmanned; the Germans had installed an automated weather station there and fled, leaving it undefended and easily captured by the Allies. Nussbaum, however, continued sending reports. Far removed from the main settlements, it lasted through the winter, until the following summer, when on June 20, 1943, Norwegian forces surprised the outpost, killing one man and driving off the remaining five, who escaped in a nearby German U-boat.
This tit-for-tat continued for the remainder of the war. Never a significant site of battle, the archipelago saw repeated skirmishes as warring powers attempted to maintain control. The much-feared German battleship Tirpitz, in one its only offensive action during the entire war, attacked Allied forces shortly after the Nussbaum raid, on September 8, 1943, in concert with another German battlecruiser, the Scharnhorst, killing six Norwegians and taking 31 people prisoners. But they could not hold the island for long, lasting less than a month before the American cruiser USS Tuscaloosa arrived on October 19 with supplies and reinforcements. The Allies once again dominated the main fjord.
Even so, Germany did manage to erect one final weather base—this one far from the habited settlements on the island of Spitsbergen. Operation Haudegen established a meteorological station on the northern coast of the uninhabited island Nordaustlandlet, which began transmitting data to the German Gestapo in Tromsø in northern Norway on September 9, 1944. It continued unmolested for the duration of the war, protected in large part because it was so remote. But its very remoteness proved challenging for the German soldiers who manned the station. In the wake of Hitler’s suicide, Tromsø instructed them to destroy their weather reports as well as any secret documents in the base, and to prepare for a rescue landing. But the relief never came, and on May 24, the signal from Tromsø went dead. With only a rowboat, the stranded German soldiers had no means of getting off the island and further attempts to hail anyone went unanswered.
The 11 men were left to their own devices on one of the most uninhabitable islands on the planet; they tried to make the best of it, continuing their meteorological and scientific work while waiting for word from Germany. Finally in August, with the prospect of another punishing winter approaching, they resorted to sending distress signals on Allied channels. In early September, their signal was intercepted by Norway, who sent a seal-hunting vessel to retrieve the soldiers and formally accept their surrender.
They were the last of Hitler’s army to surrender.
More traces of World War II
Building material is scarce in Svalbard; well above the tree line, everything—including timber—must be brought in. Buildings don’t stay abandoned for long; if they can’t be reused, they’re dismantled, their timber and steel scrapped for more useful projects. This was the fate of Nussbaum: deconstructed after the war, soon it was nothing but detritus. But in 1992 Norway passed the Cultural Heritage Act, mandating that nothing older than 1946 could be further disturbed, leaving everything on the island that wasn’t naturally frozen in place. For over three decades, this rusted wreckage has stood untouched, an ad hoc war memorial and open-air museum for a war fought 70 years ago.
Now it seems almost unfathomable that this had once been a theater of conflict. But then, the remains of Nussbaum were not the first remnants of war my group had seen on the island. Farther south, under the bleak serenity of the 24-hour sun, we passed the remains of a Svalbard reindeer. A full rack of antlers, lower jawbone, and half of a spinal column lay picked clean atop a bed of fur that covered the brown silt in a hazy white. A reminder out here of what can be used and recycled, and what gets left behind, ultimately, as useless. I walked past it over unstable, mushy terrain in search of something even our guides had only heard of but never seen firsthand.
Geologist Wilhelm Dege. Head of Operation Haudegen, Dege oversaw the weather station established in Svalbard by the Germans in 1944.
Photograph archived by Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Archive for Geography, Wilhelm Dege Papers
Finally, we came upon it: a Junkers Ju 88. The German fighter plane sat in a field of ice, its metal frame still gleaming in the arctic sun. Much of its fuselage was missing, as though eaten away, but its tail was nearly entirely preserved, as were its wings. The cockpit was a skeletal frame of steel and wire. Scattered around the plane were a few other objects—a gas tank, a tire from the landing gear—clues of the hard landing on uneven terrain.
Over 15,000 Ju 88s had been built by Germany during the war, and the twin-engine, four-man plane proved extensively versatile in several combat roles, both as a fighter and a bomber. The plane before us, once known as tail number 4D+GS, had been one of dozens of fighters sent to attack the convoy PQ 18: an Allied flotilla of 40 freighters and their escorts, which left Scotland on September 2, 1942, en route first to Iceland and then to Arkhangelsk in the Soviet Union.
The convoy was harried constantly by German fighters and submarines, losing 13 ships. German forces, however, suffered as well, the Allies claiming four U-boats and 44 aircraft, including this one, damaged by flak and forced to make an emergency landing here in southern Spitsbergen. The belly landing damaged the plane severely, but the crew survived and were rescued shortly after the crash landing, leaving only the plane (which was later scavenged for sensitive electronics by the Germans). It’s remained here ever since.
The gleaming steel in the patch of white snow reflected the low, persistent sun, makes it difficult to get a clear look at it, blending into the bleakness of the landscape. Its steel and wiring defied the elements, as though Nature had chosen to leave the wreckage untouched, even as the climate all around it changed in ways both drastic and imperceptible.
Cape north of Stationsbach. With no satellites and other ways of monitoring the weather, manned weather stations in Svalbard were the only way to measure the weather, particular over the Berents Sea off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia.
Photograph archived by Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Archive for Geography, Wilhelm Dege Papers
At Signehamna, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of these ruins without our guide leading us there and explaining what had transpired—it would be just another set of rusted scraps. Even had it been identifiable as a weather station, there’s nothing inherently violent about such technologies. The Ju 88, on the other hand, is more immediately legible as a weapon of war.
Even still and silent, the presence of this warcraft cuts against the stillness of the land, a reminder that anything, no matter how bucolic, can be a theater of war—and how eerily such traces are preserved out here in the High Arctic.
The coldest war continues
World War II may seem in the distant past, but there are signs that Svalbard may once again become involved in future conflicts in the frozen North. Since 2022 relations between the main Norwegian settlements and the remaining Russia ones, and many tour operators refuse to take visitors to the Russian mining settlements which are both state owned. It was just one sign of a new era, where cooperation has given way to rivalry. As the United States attempts to strengthen its grip on Greenland, European and Asian powers—not just Norway and Russia, but China as well, who has tried to buy large land tracts in the islands—are subtly trying to ensure a foothold in the archipelago. In a warming world, the Arctic Ocean will become more and more valuable—not just for commerce and tourism, but for global dominance.
While on the surface, Svalbard seems like an almost stateless utopia, behind the scenes everyone is jockeying for control of this barren Arctic archipelago once again.
*Archive fotos from source article of National Geographic Society
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