Coast Guardsmen Raid German Weather Station in Greenland, 1944. US National Archives 26-G-2993. 

1. Echoes of a Nazi past
2. Greenlandic Nazism takes shape
3. Explaining the appeal of fascism to the Greenlanders
4. Notes

After more than two centuries as the primary colonial authority in Greenland, Denmark functionally ceased to exist as an independent nation on 9 April 1940, collapsing under the pressure of Hitler’s invasion following a scant few hours of fighting. The Greenlanders were now in a curious situation; a colonised people with no contact from their colonisers, save those Danes left in the country when their enfeebled metropole fell.

Power in Greenland was rapidly assumed by the two Danish governors — Eske Brun in the north and Aksel Svane in the south — although from 1941 Brun was de facto governor of the whole territory. Henrik Kauffman, Copenhagen’s ambassador in Washington, D.C., also assumed an elevated importance as an independent actor. He negotiated an agreement in 1941 that allowed the United States to establish a military presence in Greenland — an agreement for which Kauffman was declared a traitor by the occupied government in Copenhagen. Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) was established in the far northwest of Greenland in 1943, bringing thousands of American servicepeople onto the island (5,500, compared to a civilian population of just 20,000) and providing the Greenlanders with unprecedented opportunities for contact with the world outside Denmark.¹

The relationship between the American personnel and the Greenlanders was mixed; Brun wished to limit contact to an absolute minimum, whereas Kauffman wished to impress upon the Greenlanders the benefits of the US’s presence, particularly through medical assistance. Kauffman reported that there were some instances of US personnel assaulting Greenlanders, and also that the Americans were disappointed with the suspicion and ‘atmosphere of neutrality’ with which the Greenlanders met them.²

The long-brewing desire in Greenland for economic and cultural modernisation was catalysed further by this experience. One noteworthy advocate of this perspective was Augustinus ‘Augo’ Lynge, an Inuit Greenlander and teacher at the Nuuk seminary who in 1942 established the youth organisation Nunatta Qitornai (Our Nation’s Children). Seemingly due to his agitation for a new, outward looking Greenland that more closely resembled a modern European nation — a campaign for which he gained some support among seminary students — Lynge was sent in 1943 to the small town Aasiaat/Egedesminde.³ Historian Jens Heinrich points to another potential reason for the transfer: ‘Undocumented rumours maintain that Lynge harboured sympathies for the Germans.’⁴

Echoes of a Nazi past

A surprising depth of material is available to trace the spread of Nazi sympathies in Greenland during the Second World War. Most remarkably, the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk possesses a red fabric armband featuring a swastika in a white circle and an upstanding polar bar above it — a staggering artefact from a short-lived Greenlandic fascist movement that, according to the available sources, saw some Inuit Greenlanders participate in Nazi salutes, fashion makeshift German military clothing, and even envision the annexation of their island by the Third Reich.

The most complete history of the Nazi movement in Greenland was compiled by German historian Daniel Nagelstutz in 2021. As Nagelstutz tells it, interactions between the Nazi Germans and the Inuit Greenlanders began in the 1930s with a series of German scientific and polar expeditions, during which the Germans established friendly relations with the local populations, both Danes and Inuit. A flag bearing the swastika was first erected in Greenland by one of these expedition teams in 1933. Inuit groups often visited the Germans at their camps (at which there were tents bearing the swastika), while Danish administrators and religious leaders also got to know the explorers.

The expedition teams generally expressed positive feelings about the Inuit and admired their adaptation to the harsh environment. Building on similar observations, some Nazi ideologues at the SS Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) institute even theorised that the ‘Nordic Germanic race’ might have originated in Greenland, and that the ‘Eskimos’ had interacted or interbred with this race, although Hitler himself was highly critical of the racial qualities of the ‘Eskimos’.⁵

Encounters between Greenland and Nazi Germany continued during the war years. Both the Allied and Axis Powers endeavoured to increase their capacity to measure and predict meteorological changes. Weather stations in Greenland were particularly valuable, as Greenland sits at the intersection of numerous weather systems.⁶ In August-September 1941, the German authorities sent a young man aboard a Norwegian civilian boat headed for the northeast coast of Greenland, tasking him with radioing back simple weather observations. The US Coast Guard caught wind of this activity and captured the boat — the first US capture of the Second World War, predating its official entry into the conflict.⁷

Over the winter of 1941–2, the Wehrmacht itself successfully set up the first of three manned weather stations in East Greenland — the only Nazi occupation of territory in North America (excluding the automated Weather Station Kurt set up in Newfoundland). To survey the east coast and find German meteorological installations, the US and Greenlandic-Danish authorities established the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol, a group of Scandinavian and Inuit dog-sledders. The crew of the last of these weather stations, the not-yet-operational Edelweiss II, was captured by US soldiers in November 1944.⁸

The German polar expeditions and weather stations gave Nazi Germany a tangible presence in Greenland; some Greenlanders had met representatives of the Reich and had enjoyed pleasant exchanges with them. If any of them were to seek the patronage of an alternative colonial power to Denmark, Germany was a proximate choice.

Greenlandic Nazism takes shape

According to Nagelstutz’s research ‘the starting point of Greenlandic Nazism was the catechetical seminary in Nuuk’, a teaching institution associated with the Lutheran Church of Denmark — the same institution from which Augo Lynge was exiled in 1943. Nazi sympathies at the seminary apparently developed to such an extent that some of the students organised a meeting in the gymnasium in support of Hitler.

The suspected focal point of Nazism in Nuuk was Adelbert Fuglsang-Damgaard, the head of the seminary from 1934 to 1945. As a German-born, German-speaking man with friends living in Nazi Germany, Fuglsang-Damgaard was an obvious target for suspicions of this kind, despite his having spoken out publicly against anti-Semitism and totalitarianism multiple times during the 1930s and 1940s.

Some believed the rot had spread throughout the Danish leadership in Greenland. A letter sent by one Carl Frederik Bistrup Simony to the new Greenland governor Magnus Jensen in 1946 spoke of a ‘Godthaab sect’ (Godthaab being the prior name of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital) supposedly consisting of Fuglsang-Damgaard, previous governor Eske Brun, trade inspector Axel Malmquist, and rural dean Aage Bugge, all of whom were guilty of ‘complicity in the Nazi activities of the seminarians’.⁹

At some stage, strong Nazi sympathies also emerged in Sisimiut, a town 200 miles to the north of Nuuk. Danish journalist Ole Vinding, who visited Sisimiut in 1945, was told of a ‘Nazi movement in the colony’. As Nagelstutz narrates, Vinding found that there had been

a small group of Greenlandic Nazi sympathizers in Sisimiut, where anti-Danish sentiment is said to have been particularly pronounced among parts of the Greenlandic population. Based on eyewitness accounts, Vinding reports on the practices and symbols of the Nazi movement, whose followers are said to have saluted with arms on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, taught children the “Sieg Heil” at school, adapted their sealskin boots (kamikker) to look like military boots, and adopted the German salute. Last but not least, the members of the group are said to have worn swastika armbands decorated with an upright polar bear outside the white circle. According to Vinding, two catechists trained in Nuuk are said to have spread the gospel of National Socialism in the North Greenland colony. In Nuuk, the friendliness towards Germany was notorious at times and even divided Danish officials on this issue. However, the friendly attitude towards Nazi Germany in the Greenlandic administrative capital did not [according to Vinding] turn into “pure Nazism”.

In a 1964 travelogue, German geographer Wilhelm Dege reported that he was told by ‘an anonymous but serious informant from Sisimiut’ that the settlement once had a kind of ‘Heim ins Reich’ (Home to the Reich) movement which planned to ask Germany to ‘annex’ (Anschluss) Greenland. Greenlandic journalist Kristian Poulsen claimed that the Nazi group in Sisimiut broke up in 1945 when it was clear that the Third Reich would fall.¹⁰

The Second World War disrupted and reshaped older patterns of Greenlandic political thought. In reminiscences published in 1996 and 2005, Greenlandic journalist and politician Jørgen Fleischer, who was a student at the seminary from 1940 to 1944, recalls that ‘the war divided the Greenlandic population into three different categories: The Danish faithful, the American-friendly and the Nazi sympathizers’.¹¹

Greenlandic media consumption — which from 1942 included radio — reflected a firm curiosity about the seismic movements in German politics. In 1937, the editor of Atuagagdliutit newspaper told a German colleague: ‘My readers are not very interested in European events; only the events in Germany are of great interest.’¹² It was not just the war itself, but the ideological component of the global conflict that attracted Inuit eyes and ears. Vinding believed that some Greenlanders ‘saw in this satanic gospel [Nazism] a chance to have their supposed disregard [by Denmark] redressed by violence and spiritual humiliation’.¹³

Explaining the appeal of fascism to the Greenlanders

Modern theorists tend to concur that Inuit Nazism was tied up with attitudes towards (and ideologies instilled by) the Danish authorities. Ulrik Pram Gad, a scholar of Greenlandic nationalism, notes that Greenland, due to its long association with Denmark, was heavily influenced by a German Kulturnation approach to statehood and ethnicity, a form of nationalism that was given a Danish spin by the Lutheran theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig. As a consequence, Greenlandic national identity came to be ‘associated with a long-lasting, romantic, and intimate relationship to the land and sea’, emphasising ‘linkages between blood and soil’, and yearning for a mythological golden past; a time when the Greenlandic Volk were at their purest. Another (unforeseen) consequence of this ideological germination is that Danes, as the colonisers, ‘appear in Greenlandic identity discourse as those who first corrupted indigenous Greenlandic identity’, a corruption which many Greenlanders came to resent.¹⁴

Following a parallel train of thought, Jens Heinrich offers the following hypothesis:

The people who were dissatisfied with the Danish presence and superiority might have thought: The enemy of my enemy is my friend, i.e., the Danes in Greenland were on the side of the Allies and the Nazis were their enemies, so siding with the Nazis was the preferable choice. The possibility of German victory would have given the sympathisers an advantage. … An alternative yet obvious conclusion is that the authorities cynically labelled dissidents as Nazi sympathisers to clip their wings. At the same time, Greenlanders were presumably ignorant about the true nature of Nazism. Germany’s success in the first years of the war had earned them a number of “fans”.¹⁵

Nagelstutz points out that the Greenlandic Nazi movement — or rather, the attachment to some of the racial-ideological components underpinning it — was not a mere momentary fascination but in fact left a lasting legacy in the lexicon of Greenlandic nationalism. The most impassioned nationalists in the postwar period invoked the right of those carrying ‘Eskimo blood’ as the ‘rightful inhabitants’ of their ancestral land, even declaring that ‘the unmixed, genuine blood cries out the loudest’.

In the context of deep-seated nationalist discontentment with the Danish authorities, it is not wholly surprising that Nazi iconography, if not necessarily Nazi ideology, briefly found a place in Greenland. As Nagelstutz concludes:

The Nazi sympathisers may have hoped that a German victory would bring about Greenland’s independence from Denmark. But the experience of everyday racism also created the ideal breeding ground for right-wing sentiments among the Greenlandic Inuit. In the social climate of discrimination, Greenland’s tendencies to break away from the colonial centre turned into expressions of National Socialist sympathy. In this complex context, the swastika armband, in conjunction with the Greenlandic heraldic animal [the upright polar bear], appears as a cynical symbol of anti-colonial resistance.¹⁶

However, the fact that Nazism seems to have spread primarily through the religious and educational institutions of the colonial power, and the fact, moreover, that it was the Danish authorities that brought many of the ideological and rhetorical components of racialised nationalism to Greenland, also points to a less resistance-oriented explanation. Perhaps some of the Nazi-affiliated Greenlanders were participating in a movement that (whether this was true or not) appeared to be led by influential European figures in the colonial administration. That impression certainly existed in the national discourse. We might also consider the fact that the Danish government in Copenhagen was now under Nazi control, so ‘loyalty’ to Denmark might have taken on a different inflection for some.

Finally, it is plausible that Germany’s military momentum in Europe could have encouraged some to conclude that Nazism was simply the next evolution of ‘civilised’ life and that ‘modernisation’ in Greenland meant keeping up with the changing times.

Notes

1. E. Beukel, ‘Greenland and Denmark before 1945’, in E. Beukel, F. P. Jensen, and J. E. Rytter (eds.), Phasing out the colonial status of Greenland, 1945–54 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), pp. 21–6. ↩︎
2. Ibid., pp. 27–8. ↩︎
3. A. K. Sørensen, Denmark-Greenland in the twentieth century (Copenhagen: Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland, 2006), pp. 74–6. ↩︎
4. J. Heinrich, ‘Appendix 12. Change of status in 1953: The Greenlanders’ relationship with Denmark from 1945 to 1954’, in Beukel, Jensen, and Rytter, Phasing out the colonial status of Greenland, p. 427.
   ↩︎
5. D. Nagelstutz, ‘“I dette sataniske Evangelium”’: Nazistische Strömungen in Grönland während des Zweiten Weltkriegs’, European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 2021, pp. 309–14. https://doi.org/10.1515/ejss-2021-2038 ↩︎
6. M. Gjerstad and J. Rogers, ‘Knowledge is power: Greenland, great powers, and lessons from the Second World War’, The Arctic Institute, 15 June 2021. https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/knowledge-power-greenland-great-powers-lessons-second-world-war/ ↩︎
7. F. Skarstein ‘“A cursed affair” — how a Norwegian expedition to Greenland became the USA’s first maritime capture in World War II’, Polar Research, vol. 26, no. 2, 2007, pp. 181–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-8369.2007.00019.x ↩︎
8. J. F. Jensen and T. Krause, ‘Wehrmacht occupations in the new world: Archaeological and historical investigations in Northeast Greenland’, Polar Record, vol. 48, no. 3, 2012, pp. 269–70, 277. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247411000180 ↩︎
9. Nagelstutz, ‘“I dette sataniske Evangelium”’, pp. 303–5. ↩︎
10. Ibid., pp. 306–7. ↩︎
11. Ibid., p. 303. ↩︎
12. Ibid., p. 308. ↩︎
13. Ibid., p. 315. ↩︎
14. U. P. Gad, National identity politics and poscolonial sovereignty games: Greenland, Denmark, and the European Union (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017), pp. 33–4, 45–6, 75. ↩︎
15. Heinrich, ‘Change of status in 1953’, p. 428. ↩︎
16. Ibid., p. 316. ↩︎