Company wooden eye

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Coordinates: 74 ° 37 ′  N , 18 ° 49 ′  W

Relief Map: Greenland
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Company wooden eye​
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Greenland

The company Holzauge was a weather station of the German Wehrmacht , which was set up by the German Reich in the Second World War after the occupation of Denmark almost without a fight in the Weser Exercise company on the island of Greenland , which is politically part of Denmark .

course

On August 22, 1942, the fishing steamer Sachsen , which had been converted into a weather observation ship, landed with a Wehrmacht unit under the command of Lieutenant zur See Hermann Ritter (1891-1968) and a group of meteorologists under the direction of Gottfried Weiss (1911-?), A total of 17 men from Tromso from in East Greenland . One month earlier, on a reconnaissance flight, Weiss had identified the area around the 75th parallel as the ideal location for a weather station.

On site, Ritter then chose the Hansa Bay on the Sabine Island as a wintering place. The group managed to remain undetected until March 11, 1943 and to report their weather observations to Germany.

When they were accidentally discovered on May 13, 1943 by members of the Nordøstgrønlands Slædepatrulje (Sled Patrol Northeast Greenland), a gun battle broke out in the course of which the Danish corporal (non-commissioned officer) Eli Knudsen was fatally wounded. Two members of the patrol were captured and the headquarters of the Eskimonæs sled patrol near the southern tip of the island of Clavering Ø around 95 kilometers southwest on March 25, partially destroyed. They later managed to escape, bringing Lieutenant Ritter with them as a prisoner. He spent the remainder of the war in American captivity .

The remaining members of the sled patrol retreated 600 km south to Scoresbysund and reported the position of the German weather station, which was attacked and largely destroyed on May 25 by four US bombers stationed in Iceland . As a result, most of the crew was evacuated by a German flying boat on June 6th and 17th . Heavily damaged by ice, Saxony was sunk (itself) on March 17, 1943.

The Nordøstgrønlands slædepatrulje was set up in 1941 by the Danish governor in Greenland in agreement with the Americans in order to be able to monitor possible German activities in Northeast Greenland. The patrol consisted of Danish police officers and Danish, Greenlandic and Norwegian fur hunters. Most of them had lived in northeast Greenland for years and knew their way around the inhospitable area. The patrol was disbanded in 1945 and the Sirius sled patrol was set up in its place in 1950 .

Wehrmacht weather stations in the Arctic

f1Georeferencing Map with all coordinates: OSM | WikiMap

Company / station location Period Coordinates
Company bud Albert-I-Land , Svalbard October 29, 1941 until ... 79 ° 16 '  N , 11 ° 32'  E
Company Haudegen Nordaustlandet , Svalbard October 1941 to September 4, 1945 80 ° 3 '  N , 22 ° 31'  E
Treasure digger weather station Alexandraland , Franz-Josef-Land September 22, 1943 to July 11, 1944 80 ° 51 '  N , 47 ° 28'  E
Company bass violinist Shannon Island , Northeast Greenland October 1943 to June 3, 1944 75 ° 19 ′  N , 17 ° 48 ′  W.
Edelweiß 2 company (Tyskerdepot) Lille Koldewey , Northeast Greenland October 4th November 1944 76 ° 41 ′  N , 18 ° 44 ′  W.
Company wooden eye Sabine Ø , Northeast Greenland August 1942 to March 1943 74 ° 37 '  N , 18 ° 49'  W
Company Zugvogel Greenland Sea October to December 8, 1944 80 ° 0 '  N , 2 ° 0'  E

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website of the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart , accessed on June 2, 2014