https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/hitler-greenland/685984/
"Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s.
According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21,
1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth”
than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to
cross Greenland’s interior. A surviving volume from Hitler’s private book
collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer
Alfred Wegener’s
Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930 and
inspired the 1933 adventure film
S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and
eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Hitler’s personal copy of
History of the Expedition, the narrative of the
tragic Wegener venture, can be perused in the rare-book collection at the
Library of Congress among the 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler’s private
library. The 198-page monograph bears his personal bookplate—ex libris, eagle,
swastika—like many of the others, but is notable because unlike most, it does
not include a handwritten inscription by an author, a close associate, or a
distant admirer. This suggests that the volume was a personal acquisition
rather than a gift, a fact made all the more interesting by the 1933
publication date, the first year of the Hitler chancellorship, when the Nazi
leader’s interest in Greenland transitioned from personal to strategic."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
