Company crusaders
The German navy set up a weather station on Svalbard under the code name of the company Kreuzritter , which was operated from October 1943 to June 1944 under the direction of ornithologist and Arctic researcher Hans-Robert Knoespel . The crew consisted of twelve men who were brought to the Liefdefjord in the northeastern area of the archipelago on the weather observation ship Karl J. Busch and picked up again the following summer by the submarine U 703 . Towards the end of the company, Knoespel was killed in an accident. He was buried near the station.
 
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Starting position
The German invasion of Norway initially had no effect on Svalbard , which was populated by Russians and Norwegians. The provisions of the agreed in 1920 Spitzberg contract survived the weather data collected here, though the islands under Norwegian stand management, all nations are available.
Since the beginning of the war, the local Norwegian and Soviet weather observers had accordingly also transmitted weather data to the German side, which in turn organized supply flights for the meteorologists. But with the establishment of the system of northern sea convoys after the attack on the Soviet Union , the Barents Sea and thus also the archipelago moved more into the focus of the warring nations. In the course of Operation Gauntlet , a British-Canadian expeditionary force under Norwegian leadership secured Svalbard in late summer 1941, cleared the civil meteorological facilities and placed the island under martial law. In August 1941, Soviet citizens were evacuated from Spitzbergen to Arkhangelsk and 765 Norwegians to Great Britain in 1955 . In September of the same year, the navy began to use the islands as a base for weather stations.
The first station of this type was built by the Bud company . The knowledge gained here not only supported the sea war against the Allied convoy system, but was also of far-reaching military importance, because conclusions can be drawn about the meteorological developments in Northern and Central Europe from observing the weather situation in the Arctic region .
Planning
Hans-Robert Knoespel had already gained experience in the Arctic with the Herdemerten-Greenland expedition before the outbreak of war and, based on this, in the summer of 1942 led a weather team that had been deployed on Spitsbergen as part of the Knospe company . He then got involved in setting up the training center for arctic weather research on the Goldhöhe in the Giant Mountains , where he later took over the training management. In addition, Knoespel developed the so-called Knoespel cube, a modular system for setting up weather stations.
For the winter of 1943/44 he tried to re-lead a weather team that was supposed to be active on Spitsbergen again, but this time to consist of twelve instead of six men. This doubling of the crew compared to previous operations seemed sensible in view of the isolated location of the planned station, especially since external camps should be set up and temporarily manned if possible. Another aspect was the psychologically demanding effects of the planned period: the polar night . These considerations were based on suggestions by Knoespel, which were based on his own experience with the Herdermerten expedition, the Knospe company in the previous year, as well as the already evaluated experience of the Nussbaum weather team . This weather group was discovered by a Norwegian patrol in mid-June, killing a German who happened to come across the hidden Norwegians who were observing the station while on a scouting tour. As a result, company Nussbaum had to be canceled and the weather team evacuated. Another aspect grew out of military considerations, according to which a more manned station could better defend itself against attacks by enemy troops. Knoespel selected the crew of the station of the planned company from the course participants of the Goldhöhe and the participants of his previous company. The equipment was put together at the marine equipment center in Warin and was professionally looked after by the Greifswald marine observatory .
designation
The company was given the code name Crusader . This name was given for reasons of secrecy - until then, weather operations were named based on the respective head: Knospe after Knoespel or Nussbaum after Nusser. However, this series was later varied. On the one hand, since there had already been a weather company, the name of which was derived from Knoespel's name, and it was also planned to award him the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross after the end of the upcoming venture , the operation was referred to as the Crusader Company .
Enterprise
On board the weather observation ship Karl J. Busch (WBS 3), the weather team set out from Kiel on September 19, 1943, heading north. The ship reached Narvik on September 26th. There the equipment was supplemented, including reindeer fur sleeping bags . On September 29, the Karl J. Busch went on to Tromsö and then to Hammerfest , where the escort submarine U 355 was waiting under the command of Corvette Captain Günter La Baume , which had explored the Svalbard fjords in the summer. Knoespel switched to the submarine with six men and both ships left Hammerfest after additional material was added on October 2, 1943. Bear Island was passed two days later in increasingly heavy seas .
Exploring the area
The small association reached Svalbard on October 6th. While the weather observation ship was heading straight for the target area, Commander La Baume tried unsuccessfully with U 355 to approach the northern tip of Andrée-Land , where there was a small hut near Gråhuken that Knoespel wanted to examine. Before the war, the painter and author Christiane Ritter and her husband Hermann Ritter spent the winter in this hut as fur hunters. Since it did not seem possible to cross over in a rubber dinghy in view of the strong wind, the inspection of the abandoned hut was waived.
Both ships met again on October 7th. In the Liefdefjord, the low-lying weather observation ship ran aground near Sørdals Bay 400 meters from the shore and had to be unloaded in order to be released. Knoespel, who originally intended the end of the fjord as the location, now determined the east bank of Sørdals Bay on the northwest bank of the Liefdefjord as the final location for the station to be built. While the weather team and the crew of Karl J. Busch, who was meanwhile affected by severe flooding, were bringing the material ashore, Knoespel and Commander La Baume explored the surrounding fjords with U 355 and dropped four men ashore, who set up two satellite camps and then settled in two groups should break through to the station.
Setting up the station
When Knoespel returned to Sørdals Bay with the submarine on October 12th, not all of the material was unloaded because the engine of Karl J. Busch's dinghy was defective and the transport had to be done by dinghy and rowing boat. All the material was not brought ashore until October 17th, after which the construction of the station began according to the modular principle of the cube system developed by Knoespel. In total, the station consisted of six such Knoespel-cubes, each of which had an edge length of three meters. The sheeting of the cubes quickly proved too thin for the arctic climate, and the plastic windows curled and let in additional cold. In addition, it was forgotten to include thick planks as a base, so that the modular station had to be built on driftwood that happened to be lying around. When the construction was finally completed on October 20, the four troop members who had set up the two subcamps also returned. On the same day U 355 and the weather observation ship left the Liefdefjord and the crew of the crusaders was on their own.
Operation of the station
South of the station, two radio masts, each nine meters high, were erected, between which a T antenna was clamped. The radio transmission was not supposed to start until the island was surrounded by ice, but the crew began regular meteorological service as early as November 1st. On November 9th, 10th and 29th, radiosondes were launched on an experimental basis . Data transmission began at the beginning of December, with the first altitude data being recorded at an altitude of 16 kilometers.
A large part of the station's supplies were taken to so-called external storage facilities, which had already been set up in the course of construction and which have since been expanded. They were only labeled with letters for camouflage and were also used for data collection. The crew not only left it to record meteorological and oceanographic phenomena - flora and fauna were also observed and described and appropriate samples were collected. On occasion, provisions and material were first brought from the station to an interim storage facility called the ice storage facility and then transported on to the sub-camps, which were too far away to make the journey in one march. One of the satellite camps was located northwest of the station on Raudfjord (Red Bay) and the other on the reindeer peninsula (Reinsdyrflya) further east . The frequency of visits to these external camps and thus the transport of supplies increased at the beginning of 1944.
On the basis of his previous three Arctic ventures, Knoespel had drawn up extensive work plans for the members of the station crew that included much more than meteorological tasks. In addition, he held the crew for social activities and discussion evenings.
From December 1, 1943 to June 26, 1944, Kreuzritter sent 608 surface weather reports (Obse) and 201 altitude weather reports (Temps) . Towards the end of the mission, Hans-Robert Knoespel was killed trying to disarm the booby traps in a mined hunting lodge on Sørdals Bay.
collection
Under the command of Paul Brasack , U 737 set sail from Hammerfest on June 24th to pick up the weather team . For Brasack it was the seventh mission with this boat in arctic waters. U 737 reached Liefdefjord on June 30th.
Knoespel's death
That morning, Knoespel set out with his dog to clear mines laid by the Germans in the hunting lodge on the opposite bank of Sørdals Bay. He feared that the submarine crew could land in the wrong place as a result of the bad weather conditions and accidentally enter the hut. With binoculars, the members of the weather team were able to follow the action from across the bay. They saw Knoespel enter the hut - probably to set up explosives - and then take cover with his dog some distance away. After nothing happened for a while, Knoespel got up again and walked towards the hut. At that moment the building exploded and Knoespel remained motionless while the dog jumped around him, barking. The station members who rushed up with a sledge found him seriously injured and unresponsive. About three hours after the accident, Knoespel died without regaining consciousness. The body was buried with the help of the submarine crew on a small hill near the station. A cross was erected on the grave.
departure
At the time of collection, around 30% of the original inventory was still available in terms of stocks and supplies. The members of the weather team had stowed the majority in the subcamps and the station itself, as it was planned to resume operations as part of a follow-up company. They kept a small portion ready as a supplement for the expected U 737 . The submarine, for its part, had a Land Weather Radio (WFL) on board that could record meteorological data and transmit it automatically. Under the guidance of the weather service employee, Government Councilor Edwin Stoebe, the submarine crew installed the WFL near the station. Stoebe helped develop these devices as an engineer at Siemens . Since the WFL were given cover names that were based on the names of the weather service employees involved in the installation, this device was called "Edwin III".
When U 737 arrived, there were only seven men at the station, three more were in the sub-camp at the southern Raudfjord on Klinckowströmfjord and one was in the intermediate station ice storage . After Commander Brasack had taken those present and their luggage on board, the boat left Sørdals Bay at around 3 p.m. on July 1. On the same day U 737 reached the Raudfjord, where it ran onto a cliff that was not shown on the nautical charts. The crew only managed to get the boat free again after two hours. On the afternoon of July 2nd, the four remaining members of the weather team - the man from the ice camp had meanwhile made his way to the satellite camp - were taken on board.
The men made a good impression on Commander Brasack, even if Knoespel's death, which had obviously been greatly appreciated, made their spirits gloomy. The boat did not go straight back to the Norwegian coast, but first went to the north coast of Bear Island , where an irregularity had occurred in the WFL 34 ("Hermann") set up there, which Stoebe with the support of a small landing command on the night of the 5th fixed July 6th. A day later the boat reached Hammerfest and then drove down the Norwegian coast to the Tromsø naval base , where the weather party disembarked.
remains
Initially, it was planned to keep the station buildings for further use, so they were left intact. In addition, some of the equipment and extensive provisions remained in the abandoned station. In September 1944, the Karl J. Busch , escorted by U 307, transported a weather group as part of the Haudegen company to north-east Spitsbergen. Since the return trip over the autumn stormy North Atlantic posed a great risk for the unloaded weather ship due to the higher center of gravity, the commander of the submarine, Lieutenant of the Sea Friedrich-Georg Herrle, decided to call at Sørdal Bay and Karl J. Busch with him to load the material left behind by crusaders as ballast . The ships reached the station on August 27, 1944 and the crews retrieved the equipment and provisions they had left behind. As a precaution against capture by opposing forces, Herrle decided to burn the buildings down afterwards.
To this day, the location of the former weather station can be localized on the basis of some remains. The science historian Cornelia Lüdecke visited Spitzbergen in 2000 and looked for the positions of the weather stations of various nations that were set up there in the first half of the 20th century. The visits are documented with numerous photos. During an inspection of the area east of Sørdalsbucht, Lüdecke found some containers at the former location of the Kreuzritter company , with which aircraft had dropped provisions for the weather troops in the winter of 1943/44 and the following summer. In addition to further metal scrap and wood rubble, Lüdecke found corroded batteries, a destroyed barograph and a few cans of sardines .
Further Wehrmacht weather stations in the Arctic
- Company Bud (Svalbard)
- Company bass violinist (Greenland)
- Edelweiss Company and Zugvogel Company (Greenland)
- Company Haudegen (Spitzbergen, Nor.)
- Company Holzauge (Greenland)
- Automatic weather station Kurt (Labrador, America)
- Treasure graves weather station (Franz-Josef-Land, Russia)
literature
- Franz Selinger: From “Nanok” to “Eismitte”. Meteorological ventures in the Arctic 1940–1945. Convent Verlag, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-934613-12-8 ( publications of the German Maritime Museum 53).
Web links
- Weather stations on Svalbard in the "Chronicle of the Naval War 1939–1945"
Notes and individual references
- ↑ History of Svalbard during the Second World War on spitzbergen.de, accessed on October 18, 2020
- ↑ a b c Rupert Holzapfel : Deutsche Polarforschung 1940/45 manuscript, climate department of the German weather service, 1951
- ↑ a b c Wilhelm Dege : War north of 80. The last German Arctic weather station of World War II , University of Calgary Press, ISBN 1-55238-110-2 , (Introducion) page x-xxii
- ↑ a b c Cornelia Lüdecke : Historical weather stations on Spitzbergen - a visit in summer 2000. (pdf) in Polarforschung 71 (1/2): 49–56, 2001 (published 2002)
- ↑ Hermann Ritter was also active as a naval officer in military weather recording and managed the Holzauge company in 1942/43
- ↑ The WFL installed on Bear Island was codenamed "Hermann" after the meteorologist Hermann Person , who set up the device together with Stoebe.