The history of Antarctic exploration is one of high-stakes drama, survival against-the-odds and human tragedy. The expeditions led by Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, as they pushed for the South Pole and tried to cross the continent, have become the stuff of legend.
But in the first half of the 20th century, there were many others who headed for the globe’s most southerly reaches, from a range of countries, for a variety of reasons – even if these excursions have since become much less well known. One such case was the Third German Antarctic Expedition, which set sail in December 1938, on a covert quest to find whales.
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That date, of course, tells a story. Nazism had Germany in its horrific grip, and the Second World War was just around the corner. In 1936, Adolf Hitler had set out his Four-Year Plan and ambition for Germany to become self-sufficient (a policy known as autarky). At the time, Germans were enthusiastic consumers of margarine, consuming 17.5 pounds per person annually by 1930, according to Atlas Obscura, making it an important part of the national diet.
And one of the major raw ingredients in margarine was whale oil which could be hydrogenated into an edible fat. For supply to keep up with demand, Germany was reliant on Norway and imported around 200,000 tons of whale oil from the country a year. That wasn’t good news for Hermann Göring, the Nazi official who Hitler had tasked with ensuring German’s self-sufficiency.
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And the demand for whale oil wasn’t simply for dietary reasons; it was also used to manufacture soap and, even more pertinently given the spectre of war, nitroglycerin, which was used to make explosives.
Norway’s whales came from Antarctic waters, where whalers went to hunt on an unclaimed coastline known as Queen Maud Land. The Germans saw an opportunity. If they could lay claim to the land before Norway did, they could secure the whale-rich waters for themselves. They had also been whaling in Antarctica since 1936, with fleets run by fat-processing companies, so it wasn’t an entirely new venture.
Led by the explorer and World War I commander Captain Alfred Ritscher, an 82-strong crew including scientists, accompanied by a Nazi official, headed for Antarctica on a freighter named the MS Schwabenland. On board were two seaplanes, which would survey the land the team hoped to take for Germany, naming it Neu-Schwabenland, after the ship.
The success of the plan rested on the fact that no other country had claimed the icy coastline for itself. But while the Schwabenland was still en route from Hamburg, that changed. On 14 January 1939, Norway issued a royal proclamation and claimed Queen Maud Land. Germany never made its own formal claim and relinquished its goal of controlling its own whale oil supply line.
Despite this, the German Antarctic Expedition continued, dropping large darts embossed with swastikas onto the ice from its seaplanes. The Schwabenland’s voyage wasn’t entirely wasted. The explorers reported back on how the planes operated in such chilly temperatures and photographed swathes of previously undocumented land from the air. One area, the Ritscher Upland, was even named after the expedition’s captain.
Top image: MS Schwabenland after 1939, when it was used in Luftwaffe service. It was eventually scuttled by Allied forces. Credit: National Museum of the U.S. Navy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
