Kurt Herdemerten

Kurt Herdemerten during the Greenland expedition in 1938.

Kurt Herdemerten (left, standing) with Manfred Kraus (right) during the German Greenland Expedition 1930/31.

Kurt Herdemerten (born August 17, 1900 in Kettwig , † December 21, 1951 in Essen ) was a German mining engineer and polar explorer .

Life

Herdemerten grew up as the son of a Westphalian industrialist in Upper Silesia and studied geology and mining. As a doctoral student, he took part in Alfred Wegener's German Greenland Expedition in 1930/31 . Wegener chose Herdemerten primarily as an explosives expert. His tasks on the expedition consisted in seismic measurements of the thickness of the inland ice cover, which he carried out together with the geophysicist Kurt Wölcken , as well as in the construction of the shafts for the planned stations "West" at Qaumarujuk (Scheideck House) and " Eismitte ".

The events surrounding the death of Alfred Wegener during the expedition led to a rift between Herdemerten and the expedition participant Johannes Georgi . He took the party of Kurt Wegener , who publicly accused Georgi and Ernst Sorge of being indirectly responsible for the death of his brother Alfred. In 1937 there was a legal dispute between Herdemerten and Georgi, which ended with a settlement. Both parties were prohibited from continuing the dispute in public.

In 1936 Herdemerten was involved in opening up the Central Jurassic Dogger border in southern Germany.

Under the Nazi regime, he led the Herdemerten-Greenland Expedition in 1938 on behalf of the Braunschweiger Jägerhof Foundation . The aim of the expedition, which was primarily ornithological, was to research the Greenlandic flora and fauna. Special interest was given to the living conditions of the white gyrfalcon native to Greenland . At the instigation of the Reichsjägerhof "Hermann Göring" , a few specimens were to be caught if possible and brought to Germany in order to get them used to the Central European climate and to settle here.

After his return, Herdemerten set up the polar experimental station “Goldhöhe” in the Giant Mountains , which initially served for acclimatization and further research into the gyrfalcon. Later soldiers, primarily the so-called marine weather troops (MWT) , were trained for deployment in polar regions at the Goldhöhe .

After the Second World War, Kurt Herdemerten went to West Germany and gave numerous lectures on the German Greenland expeditions.

Fonts

He processed the results of the Herdemerten expedition in the book:

• Jakunguaq. The Greenland Book of the Hermann Göring Foundation. Georg Westermann publishing house, Braunschweig 1939.

In memory of Alfred Wegener and his last Greenland expedition, he wrote the book after the Second World War:

• The white desert. With Alfred Wegener in Greenland. Eberhard Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1955.

literature

• Johannes Georgi : Buried in the ice. Experiences at the “Ice Center” station of Alfred Wegener's last Greenland expedition 1930–1931. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1955.
• Else Wegener : Alfred Wegener's last trip to Greenland. The experiences of the German Greenland Expedition 1930/31 described by his travel companions and according to the researcher's diaries. New shortened edition of the with the participation of Dr. Fritz Loewe from Else Wegener worried edition. VEB F. A. Brockhaus Verlag, Leipzig 1953.

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Herdemerten in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Else Wegener 1953, p. 12
2. ↑ Jutta Voss: Johannes Georgi and Fritz Loewe. Two polar explorers' fates after “middle of the ice”. From their correspondence 1929–1971 and the collected catalogs of publications by J. Georgi and F. Loewe  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   . In: Polarforschung 62, 1992, pp 151-161
3. ↑ Herdemerten 1939, p. 109
4. ↑ Czech : Zlaté návrši