German Holdouts in Greenland 1946? Forgotten Weather Station Mystery

TL;DR

A 1946 newspaper report of 150 Nazis entrenched inland in Greenland may reflect a real, suppressed discovery of a forgotten German weather station.

Key Points

• 1.A 1946 news report described 150 Nazis holding out in Greenland. Published July 25, 1946, it claimed a Nazi detachment was entrenched on an icy plateau northwest of Angmarik, 400 miles inland, with a year's worth of supplies, and that Danish marines were ordered to round them up.
• 2.Known German Greenland operations officially ended in October 1944. The US Coast Guard Cutter Northland and East Wind captured the last two German weather stations — Adelveis 1 and 2 — taking roughly 60 prisoners total; no German presence was supposed to remain afterward.
• 3.Germany had proven capability to supply inland Greenland bases by air. A Junkers Ju290 landed on coastal ice to evacuate a weather crew in 1944, and a BV222 flying boat dropped supplies by parachute to stations — both aircraft operated from German-occupied Norway without refueling issues.
• 4.A precedent exists for overlooked German stations: Svalbard surrendered four months after V-E Day. A fully manned German military weather station on Svalbard didn't surrender until September 1945, proving Allied forces could miss active enemy installations in the Arctic.
• 5.Germany changed policy in early 1945 to move stations far inland to avoid detection. The new strategy involved digging into the ice sheet and supplying bases entirely by air, making an undiscovered inland station in 1946 plausible and consistent with that directive.
• 6.The inflated figure of 150 'Nazis' may include Nazi-sympathizing Inuit locals. Academics document pro-Nazi sentiment among some Greenlandic Inuit in the 1940s, fostered by German expeditions in the 1930s, SS Ahnenerbe studies, and a German-run seminary in Nuuk — some residents wore swastika armbands as late as 1945.
• 7.The location cited in the article — Angmarik — undermines or complicates the report's credibility. By 1946, the nearby settlement (modern Tasiilaq) hosted a US Air Force base, making a German presence there impossible; the presenter theorizes a US serviceman leaked garbled intelligence about a search further north, which the journalist misattributed geographically.