Did the Nazis Really Build a Secret Base in Antarctica?

On 17 December 1938, the German ship Schwabenland left Hamburg carrying an expedition headed by Captain Alfred Ritscher.

The timing was not especially reassuring.

Germany had annexed Austria nine months earlier. The Sudeten crisis had just ended with the Munich Agreement. Within another nine months, German forces would invade Poland and Europe would be at war.

Now a German expedition was sailing toward one of the least explored regions on Earth.

Its destination was the coast of Dronning Maud Land in Antarctica, where the expedition would survey an enormous area from the air and give part of it a new German name: Neuschwabenland, or New Swabia. Ritscher's own published expedition report survives, along with photographs, maps and scientific material.

So the first part of the conspiracy theory requires no conspiracy at all.

The Nazis really went to Antarctica.

The question is what they intended to do there.

Germany Had a Problem With Fat

The immediate reason was considerably less cinematic than flying saucers.

Germany needed whale oil.

In the 1930s, whale oil was an important industrial raw material used in products including margarine and soap. Germany imported large quantities of it, particularly from Norway, which meant spending foreign currency and depending on foreign suppliers.

The Nazi government's Four Year Plan was designed partly to make Germany more economically self-sufficient and prepared for war. Antarctic whaling therefore had strategic value. A German-controlled whaling industry could reduce dependence on Norwegian oil imports. The expedition was ordered under Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan apparatus, and experienced whaler Otto Kraul accompanied it.

That does not mean the expedition was simply a floating margarine survey.

Economic expansion, territorial ambition, science and national prestige were all mixed together. Antarctica in the 1930s was still being explored, mapped and claimed by competing states. Norway was particularly interested in the region because of its own whaling industry.

The Nazis saw an empty-looking portion of the map and behaved much as imperial powers traditionally behaved when confronted with such things.

They started drawing lines around it.

The Schwabenland Carried Aircraft

The expedition's most impressive tool was not a secret weapon but aviation.

The Schwabenland had previously served Lufthansa's transatlantic aviation operations and carried a steam catapult capable of launching flying boats. Two Dornier Wal aircraft, Boreas and Passat, were used for aerial reconnaissance over Antarctica.

During a series of survey flights in January and February 1939, the Germans photographed hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of territory. Thousands of aerial photographs were taken, allowing previously poorly mapped mountain systems and other geographical features to be documented. Ritscher's scientific and cartographic results were subsequently published, although wartime disruption meant that much of the photographic material was lost or remained unevaluated for decades.

The expedition also carried metal markers decorated with swastikas, intended to mark German interest in the territory.

It is one of those historical details that sounds invented specifically for a conspiracy documentary.

Aircraft really did fly over Antarctic wilderness dropping Nazi territorial markers onto the ice.

What they did not drop were construction crews.

Nobody Built a City Under the Ice

The expedition remained in the Antarctic region for only a few weeks.

Its personnel conducted aerial mapping, oceanographic work, meteorological observation and biological research. There was no documented programme to excavate an underground complex, establish a large permanent settlement or transport the quantities of machinery, fuel, food and building material such a project would require.

Colin Summerhayes of the Scott Polar Research Institute and historian Peter Beeching examined the Nazi Antarctic-base story in detail for the peer-reviewed journal Polar Record. They compared later claims with expedition records, wartime documents, geography, U-boat capabilities and subsequent Antarctic exploration.

They found no evidence that the 1938–39 expedition established a permanent German base.

This creates a fairly brutal logistical problem for Base 211.

An underground Antarctic installation capable of housing hundreds or thousands of personnel would need power generation, ventilation, heating, workshops, waste disposal, food storage, communications and a continuous supply system.

Antarctica is not a place where one quietly builds a city during a short visit and then forgets to mention the freight.

But the Germans Found Something Useful for the Story

During the aerial surveys, pilot Richard Schirmacher spotted an unusual ice-free region containing exposed rock and lakes.

It became known as the Schirmacher Oasis.

An ice-free landscape inside Antarctica is exactly the sort of discovery that conspiracy mythology can put to work. It sounds like evidence of geothermal heating, hidden caverns or an unexpectedly habitable interior.

Antarctic oases are ice-free areas created by combinations of local geography, low snowfall, wind and solar heating of exposed rock. The Schirmacher Oasis is is now home to scientific installations, including India's Maitri station and Russia's Novolazarevskaya station.

There is no established geothermal system beneath Dronning Maud Land capable of producing the enormous warm subterranean spaces described in later Nazi-base literature. Summerhayes and Beeching specifically examined claims that volcanic or geothermal conditions could have allowed such a refuge and found the geological evidence did not support them.

Two U-Boats Appeared in Argentina After Germany Surrendered

On 10 July 1945, more than two months after Germany's surrender, U-530 entered Mar del Plata, Argentina.

Then, on 17 August, U-977 arrived.

The timing immediately generated rumours.

Had Nazi officials escaped aboard them? Had they carried Hitler? Had they delivered treasure, documents or technology somewhere before surrendering?

Allied intelligence interrogated the crews extensively. The surviving interrogation reports are wonderfully mundane documents considering what would later be attached to them.

U-530 had operated off the United States before its commander decided to head for Argentina after Germany's collapse. U-977 had left Norway shortly before the surrender and subsequently made an extraordinary 107-day voyage before arriving at Mar del Plata. Its commander, Heinz Schaeffer, said he hoped Argentina would offer better conditions than surrender in Europe.

Neither interrogation produced evidence of an Antarctic voyage.

There was also a practical problem.

The submarines arrived during the Antarctic winter, when sea ice made the supposed journey to the Dronning Maud Land coast extraordinarily difficult. Their reconstructed routes, fuel consumption and voyage durations do not leave a convenient secret excursion to an underground Nazi harbour.

But mysterious submarines appearing in Argentina after Hitler's death were always going to have a productive second career.

“New Berchtesgaden” Appears After the War

One of the earliest major versions of the Antarctic refuge story appeared in Ladislas Szabo's 1947 book Hitler Is Alive.

Szabo claimed that a convoy of German submarines had carried senior Nazis to an Antarctic refuge he called New Berchtesgaden, named after Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat.

Summerhayes and Beeching traced the name and the phantom submarine convoy back to Szabo's account. There is no evidence of “New Berchtesgaden” in the German Antarctic expedition records.

This is an important point in the evolution of the story.

The Nazis did not leave behind documents describing a mysterious Antarctic fortress that historians later struggled to explain.

The fortress appears in postwar literature.

Once it existed in print, later writers could add things to it.

Underground factories followed.

Then secret weapons.

Then flying discs.

Then an entire surviving Nazi civilisation.

Eventually the installation acquired another wonderfully bureaucratic name: Base 211.

A number makes almost anything sound classified.

Britain Really Did Establish Secret Antarctic Bases

The story received help from another historical fact.

Britain genuinely conducted a secret wartime Antarctic operation.

Operation Tabarin began in 1943–44 and established permanently occupied British bases, including Port Lockroy. The mission had strategic and territorial motivations and was initially kept secret. British planners were concerned with sovereignty claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region, while monitoring possible enemy activity provided part of the wartime justification.

This is sometimes pulled into the Nazi-base mythology as evidence that Britain knew something was happening in Antarctica.

But geography is inconvenient again.

Port Lockroy and the main Tabarin activities were around the Antarctic Peninsula, thousands of kilometres from New Swabia.

The British were certainly playing geopolitical games in Antarctica.

They simply were not besieging Hitler's underground polar kingdom.

Then Operation Highjump Arrived

In 1946–47, the United States sent thousands of men, ships and aircraft into Antarctica during Operation Highjump.

We have already met this particular gift to conspiracy history.

A huge American naval expedition appearing less than two years after mysterious German submarines surrendered in Argentina made an irresistible sequel. Later writers claimed Highjump's true mission had been to attack the surviving Nazi colony.

There is no evidence for that mission, and Highjump did not concentrate its activities on New Swabia. But once the stories were connected, each made the other look more mysterious.

The German expedition explained why the Nazis might have a base.

The U-boats explained how they supposedly supplied it.

Highjump explained why the Americans supposedly attacked it.

And the lack of evidence became evidence that the whole affair remained classified.

At that point, the theory had acquired the useful property of being able to explain its own missing evidence.

Even Nuclear Tests Were Added

In 1958, the United States conducted Operation Argus, detonating three small nuclear devices at high altitude over the South Atlantic to study their effects on the upper atmosphere and Earth's radiation environment. U.S. government records describe the tests and their experimental purpose.

Later Antarctic-base stories sometimes transformed these explosions into attempts to destroy the hidden German installation.

The tests were not conducted over New Swabia.

They were thousands of kilometres away.

But by then the mythology was no longer constrained by geography with any particular enthusiasm.

Could Germany Have Intended to Return?

This is where the story retains a genuine historical question without requiring Base 211.

The 1938–39 expedition was not necessarily meant to be Germany's final visit.

Ritscher prepared for further Antarctic work, and additional expeditions were contemplated before the outbreak of World War II made them impractical. The Germans were interested in whaling facilities, territorial influence and the strategic possibilities of the southern oceans.

Had the war developed differently, Germany might indeed have attempted to establish a permanent Antarctic station.

Other nations eventually did exactly that.

Germany itself operates Antarctic research stations today.

So the idea of Germans building a base in Antarctica was never inherently absurd.

The problem is the date.

There is evidence that Nazi Germany explored the possibility.

There is evidence that it mapped the territory.

There is evidence that it wanted economic and political influence there.

There is no comparable evidence that it actually constructed the hidden wartime fortress described in the later stories.

This is perhaps why the legend survives so easily.

The mountains photographed by German aircraft are still there. The Schirmacher Oasis is still there. German geographical names from the expedition remain in historical and scientific literature. Original photographs and expedition reports survive in polar archives.

The Nazis really did go to Antarctica.

Everything became stranger after they came home.