The Secret Nazi Weather Station in Canada Nobody Noticed (WW2)

On 22 October 1943, the German submarine U-537 anchored in Martin Bay, at the northern tip of Labrador. Armed sailors went ashore with about ten heavy canisters and, in roughly 28 hours, built Weather Station Kurt: an automatic weather station made by Siemens, designed to radio weather readings back to occupied Europe every three hours. They scattered American cigarette packets around it and labelled one canister "Canadian Meteor Service", an agency that never existed. It is described as the only known armed German military operation on land in North America during the war, outside Greenland. The station failed within weeks, and then it was forgotten, until a scientist stumbled on it in 1977 and a historian's team identified it in 1981. Today it is in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. This is the story of the Arctic weather war, and of the eleven German weathermen of Operation Haudegen, who were still at their posts on Svalbard months after the war ended, and became the last German unit to surrender. Chapters 0:00 Cold open 0:44 Welcome 1:06 The weather is a weapon 2:12 The war nobody saw 3:23 A machine in the wilderness 4:31 U-537 5:31 Martin Bay 6:35 The disguise 7:25 Silence 9:05 Martin Bay 7 10:06 Still there 10:50 The last men to surrender 12:20 Afterwards Sources: the Wikipedia articles on Weather Station Kurt, German submarine U-537, the North Atlantic weather war and Operation Haudegen (with the German article "Unternehmen Haudegen"), uboat.net's record for U-537, and the works they cite. Sources differ slightly on some dates: U-537's loss is given as 10 or 11 November 1944, and the Haudegen surrender as 4 or 6 September 1945. The images in this video are AI-generated illustrations in an archival style, not real photographs. Narration is synthetic. Forgotten Fronts tells the stories of World War Two that slipped through the cracks. New episodes every week. #WWII #WeatherStationKurt #History