Wilhelm Dege

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Wilhelm Dege (born October 9, 1910 in Bochum ; † December 21, 1979 in Suderburg ) was a German author , educator, geographer , geologist and university professor, who is best known for his fiction and documentary books about the Arctic .

Life

In 1931 Dege completed a teaching degree at the Pedagogical Academy in Dortmund and then worked as a primary school teacher in Münster . In addition, he studied geography, geology and prehistory and undertook his own research trips to Spitzbergen in 1935, 1936 and 1938 . Dege received his doctorate in 1939 with a work on Northern Spitsbergen.

In 1940 he came to Norway as a Wehrmacht soldier because of his knowledge of the language and the country and to head a weather service expedition to Spitsbergen. During the Second World War, he led the "Haudegen" weather troop , which collected weather data for the navy in Spitzbergen. Due to the isolation, the weather team was initially not picked up even after the German surrender and now continued its observations on behalf of the Allies. It was not until September 1945, four months after the collapse of the Third Reich, that he was picked up by the crew of a Norwegian ship and brought back to mainland Norway after he was one of the last German soldiers to surrender to them.

In 1946 Dege worked again as a teacher. In 1962 he came to the Dortmund University of Education as a professor of local history and folklore and geography didactics , where he taught until 1976. From 1963 to 1968 Dege was also the managing director of the Westphalian Heimatbund .

In 1985 his son Eckart managed to track down what was left of the camp and his father's diary.

Fonts

Most of Dege's adventure story Hunters in Night and Ice takes place in Spitsbergen's Wijdefjord .
  • Hunters in Night and Ice: The Story of Hibernation on Svalbard . Enßlin & Laiblin, Reutlingen 1953.
  • Caught in the pack ice. The adventures of a modern day Robinson in the Arctic. Freiburg i. Br. 1953.
  • From Oslo to the Arctic Circle: fight and victory in central Norway . Enßlin & Laiblin, Reutlingen 1942.
  • Weather troop warhorse. Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1954
  • In the run-up to the North Pole. Rides and adventures in Svalbard. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1957.
  • Greenland without Eskimos . Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1964.
  • Legends from Westphalia. Crüwell, Dortmund 1964.
  • The Ruhr region. Ferdinand Hirt, Kiel 1976, ISBN 3-528-08322-0 .
  • Trapped in the arctic ice: weather troop "Haudegen" - the last German Arctic station of the Second World War. Convent, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-93461394-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Dege: Scientific observations on the north-east of Spitzbergen 1944–1945. With contributions by Arthur Baumann. Reports of the German Weather Service No. 72. Offenbach a. M. 1960 ( digitized version ).
personal data
SURNAME Dege, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator and scientist
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Bochum
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1979
Place of death Suderburg