0:06

It's 1977 and a team of

0:08

archaeologists and scientists is working on

0:10

a dig on the northern tip

0:12

of Labrador, Canada. They are

0:15

way up north. Like if you

0:17

got in a boat and took off

0:19

heading east, eventually you would hit

0:21

Greenland. These

0:23

researchers are studying the geography of the

0:26

area and they're looking for artifacts from

0:28

thousands of years ago, like

0:30

the remains of sod houses and

0:32

old trash piles and burial mounds.

0:36

One day they start digging right on the edge of

0:38

the water. It's really stark

0:40

and beautiful here. The

0:42

water is this deep, deep blue

0:45

and in fact this area is known to some

0:47

of the Inuit people who live nearby as a

0:50

popular fishing spot. There's cliffs

0:52

and mountains that are gray black and

0:54

dotted with snow. But

0:57

at this spot they stumble on something very

1:00

weird. It's

1:03

a group of nine metal drums. They're

1:05

about three feet high, 20 inches

1:07

in diameter, and they are

1:09

heavy. Each one weighs about

1:12

200 pounds. There's

1:14

also two masts, one

1:16

with some sort of instrument on top

1:19

and the other one like a tall

1:21

radio antenna. These

1:24

definitely are not thousands of years old.

1:26

The researchers peer at a painted sign

1:28

on one of the drums. It

1:31

says, Canadian Meteor Service. Hmm,

1:35

that seems straightforward enough. Meteorological

1:38

equipment for some Canadian

1:40

government agency. But

1:43

the problem was these were not

1:45

actually the property of the Canadian

1:47

Meteor Service. And in

1:49

fact, the Canadian Meteor Service didn't

1:52

exist. So

1:56

who put these here? And

1:58

why? I'm

2:02

Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas

2:04

Obscura, a celebration of the world's

2:06

strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today

2:09

we are tracking down the origins

2:12

of this abandoned weather station, which

2:14

has a name, Weather

2:16

Station Kurt. It

2:18

involves espionage, dog sledding, and a

2:21

war over... Well, we won't

2:23

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2:26

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Registry, Malta and Ecuador. Remember

4:00

how I said that if you took off from

4:03

the coast of Labrador and headed east you would

4:05

hit Greenland? Let's actually start

4:07

there in Greenland, specifically

4:09

on Greenland's rocky, rugged

4:11

eastern coast in March

4:13

of 1943. Three men are

4:19

on dog sleds gliding over the ice. They're

4:21

part of the Sledge Patrol, a

4:23

group of hunters recruited to patrol

4:26

Greenland's coast. They

4:28

are looking for strangers and because

4:30

this is World War II, that

4:32

means they're looking for Germans. They

4:35

head into a little fjord called

4:37

Sabine Island. There's a very isolated

4:39

hunting cabin here. This area has

4:42

got notoriously bad weather and honestly

4:44

bad hunting too, so they don't

4:46

really expect to see anything, let

4:48

alone anybody. But

4:51

then as they get closer to the

4:53

cabin, their dogs start to get agitated.

4:56

And then on the horizon, is that

4:59

smoke? The

5:01

men burst into the hunting

5:03

cabin and they find sleeping

5:05

bags, freshly killed polar bear

5:07

meat, radio equipment, cups

5:10

of coffee that are half empty, and

5:13

Nazi uniforms. The

5:18

Sledge Patrol had stumbled on what

5:20

was basically a secret intelligence operation.

5:23

These Germans were not technically spies, but

5:26

they were there to collect information that

5:28

was worth its weight in gold. Information

5:31

about the weather.

5:33

Yeah, they were basically

5:35

weathermen. We

5:38

just take it for granted that everyone knows what

5:40

the weather forecast is going to be. This

5:42

is Jeff Nokes. He's the Second World War

5:44

historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

5:47

I mean nowadays, just about everybody

5:49

who's listening to this podcast is going

5:51

to have a desktop computer or a

5:53

laptop or a tablet or mobile

5:57

phone, which will then give them

5:59

access to to weather forecasting that's beyond anyone's

6:01

wildest dreams in the 1930s and 1940s. But

6:05

that hasn't always been the case, and in

6:07

wartime, it's the sort of information that's vitally

6:09

important. During

6:12

World War II, weather conditions could

6:14

be the difference between a successful

6:16

operation and a fiasco. For

6:18

example, bad storms could blow aircrafts or

6:21

ships off course. If

6:23

the weather's really bad in and around convoys, it

6:25

may not be possible to provide air support to

6:27

them to help protect them against submarine attacks. Military

6:30

operations were quite literally timed according

6:33

to weather reports. In fact,

6:35

the D-Day invasion of Normandy was actually delayed

6:37

by one day because there were high winds

6:39

in the forecast. To

6:41

give you a sense of how prized weather information was

6:43

at this time, during the war,

6:46

the U.S. Weather Bureau actually stopped broadcasting

6:48

forecasts over the radio because they were

6:50

worried that it would be too easy

6:53

for the enemy to intercept and use

6:55

it for their advantage. But

6:58

overall, the Allies had a key edge

7:00

in the North Atlantic weather war. Yes,

7:02

that is an official term. And

7:05

that edge was geography.

7:07

Weather systems, by and large, in the Northern

7:10

Hemisphere progress from west to east. And

7:13

so because the Allies

7:15

are in the United Kingdom, obviously, and

7:17

they're in Iceland, with

7:20

America, and they have all sorts of ships at

7:22

sea and everything else, they were able to get

7:24

a pretty good handle on what atmospheric conditions are

7:26

and what storms are moving in across the continent,

7:28

for instance, or what storms are moving out across

7:30

the Atlantic. The Nazis were

7:32

left with more limited options. They

7:35

sent out U-boats or submarines to

7:37

collect weather information. But

7:39

that information then had to be broadcasted

7:41

back to Germany by radio. And

7:43

the Allies have a very complex and increasingly

7:46

effective system of direction finding of locating where

7:48

these transmissions are coming from. So that means

7:50

that being a submarine on the surface of

7:53

the Atlantic broadcasting weather conditions can

7:55

get really risky. They could

7:58

establish secret manned weather stations. and

8:00

they did. But as we saw in Greenland, those

8:02

were pretty tough to hide. It's

8:05

incredibly logistically difficult to keep people

8:07

alive because you have

8:09

to keep feeding them and giving them supplies. And when

8:11

you do put people there, they also

8:14

tend to be in installations that

8:16

attract more attention if a plane's flying over.

8:19

So they set about putting together a system

8:21

that was a little more discreet. In

8:29

October of 1943, a

8:31

Nazi U-boat numbered U-537 was bobbing

8:34

its way toward the northern tip

8:36

of Labrador. On the way,

8:38

they encounter some really horrifically bad weather. And

8:40

the weather is so bad that in fact, it

8:42

tears one of the anti-aircraft guns off the submarine.

8:46

Ironically, considering that they're being

8:48

asked to put a weather station in place. Yes,

8:51

this is a top secret weather

8:53

mission. And this is not

8:55

just any old weather station. In

8:57

the hold of this submarine is a

8:59

pretty bizarre machine. It's nine canisters, each

9:02

about three feet tall, and weighing around

9:04

200 pounds. They

9:06

automatically do things like measure wind speed,

9:08

the direction of the wind, temperature, and

9:10

atmospheric pressure. So, the fundamentals. Not

9:13

only did the station collect

9:15

weather information, it also broadcasts

9:17

these measurements automatically by radio

9:19

at regular intervals. The

9:21

key word here is automatic. No

9:24

operator necessary. The

9:27

station is nicknamed Kurt. So

9:33

the idea is that you transport these. You

9:36

put them in place. They run off batteries for months at a

9:38

time. Most of those cylinders are in fact

9:40

batteries. Because you can't go and

9:42

plug Kurt in and recharge Kurt every night the

9:45

way you do with your mobile phone, you

9:48

need a lot of batteries. Getting

9:50

Kurt and his many giant batteries onto dry land

9:52

is the first big challenge. They

9:54

have to haul these out through submarine hatches, or

9:57

from storage cylinders on deck, load them in your bag.

10:00

inflatable rubber boats and bring them ashore and install

10:02

them. And the thing is to do this as

10:04

quickly as possible. And while they're doing this, there's

10:06

some people who are keeping an armed lookout up

10:09

on a nearby hill. Believe it

10:11

or not, they actually took photos of this entire

10:13

process. There's a couple of them with these guys

10:16

looking fairly cold and not

10:18

entirely comfortable with

10:20

machine guns sitting on this hillside, keeping

10:22

an eye on things

10:24

as the installation unfolds. As

10:27

they set up Kurt, they figure that someone is

10:29

eventually going to run across the station. So they

10:31

thought they would try to cover their tracks a

10:33

little bit. So to try

10:35

to tilt the odds in their favor,

10:37

they paint Canadian meteor service on

10:40

the outside of it, which presumably is supposed to be

10:42

meteor, is supposed to be short for meteorological. Then

10:44

they scatter around empty American cigarette packages and

10:46

everything else to try to make it look

10:49

like it had been a group of

10:51

Canadians or Americans who'd been there to install this. And

10:53

so if someone stumbled across it, they might think, oh,

10:56

well, you know, it's just a Canadian weather station. So

11:10

they set Kurt up and run a technical test.

11:13

And it works. Mission accomplished. They

11:15

head back to the sub, do some operational

11:17

missions in the North Atlantic, and then go

11:19

back to Germany. But

11:22

what happens next is a little mysterious. About

11:24

a week after Kurt is installed, an

11:27

Allied plane makes an unusual patrol up

11:29

and down the Labrador coast. It's

11:31

never been fully explained why that happens. They did

11:33

fly periodic patrols, so it could have been coincidental.

11:37

But shortly afterward, back in Germany, where

11:39

they're monitoring Kurt, they're noticing

11:42

interference on the

11:44

same broadcast channels, on the same

11:47

frequencies. And then the

11:49

records are pretty vague and unclear, unfortunately.

11:51

So this is one of these big

11:53

unanswered questions is, you know, were the

11:55

Allies jamming this? Was this accidental interference

11:58

from another German radio broadcast? or

12:00

a German radio signal somewhere. And I've

12:03

never seen a definitive answer. We may never have

12:05

a definitive answer at this distance in time. After

12:12

weather station Kurtz forecast petered out,

12:14

nobody heard from it again. And

12:17

it pretty much dropped out of the history of World

12:19

War II for another 40 years. In

12:22

the meantime, local Inuit people came across it

12:24

while fishing, as did a team of archaeologists

12:26

in 1977, as we

12:28

mentioned at the beginning of the episode. But

12:31

everyone kind of just assumed it was a

12:33

Canadian or American station. Then in

12:35

the early 1980s, a retired German

12:37

engineer named Franz Selinger started digging into

12:40

the history of Nazi weather stations. He

12:42

was writing a book about it. And

12:45

he's digging through records and finds this

12:47

information about one particular station, and it

12:49

doesn't match with anything he's aware of.

12:53

And there are photographs and he's trying to

12:55

figure out, well, which submarine is it? I

12:57

don't recognize the landscape. By

12:59

doing some triangulation with old U-boat log

13:02

books, Franz figured out that the

13:04

station was actually in Canada. Then

13:06

they get in touch with Canadian authorities to

13:09

find out what had happened. And this comes

13:11

as a surprise to the relevant authorities in

13:14

Ottawa at the time. In

13:16

1981, Selinger and the official historian of the

13:18

Canadian Armed Forces made a trip up to

13:21

Labrador to see Kurt for themselves. And

13:24

here was something odd. When they got to

13:26

Kurt, they found that each of the canisters

13:28

had been opened up and everything inside was

13:30

strewn about. All of the

13:32

batteries and radio parts systematically dismantled.

13:35

They also found a single rifle cartridge

13:37

with the inscription, British

13:39

Dominion. So did

13:41

somebody sabotage Kurt on purpose? You'll

13:44

see different accounts. They range from everything from suggestions

13:46

that the Allies may in fact have known or

13:49

figured out that Kurt was there and sent a

13:51

party up to disable it. Although if

13:53

you're going to send people there to cut the cables and disable

13:55

it, you figure you'd recover the whole thing to take a look

13:57

at it. And there's...

13:59

There's also just suggestions that people might

14:02

have cut the cables to salvage the

14:04

materials in the cables as well. But

14:07

the thing is there's just enough detail

14:09

out there that it allows for all sorts of

14:11

speculation, which is one of the reasons why it's

14:14

also so interesting. If we thought that we

14:16

knew all the details, there'd be a lot less

14:18

speculation and conversation than leaving these sort of mysteries

14:21

where people can speculate. Today

14:26

you can visit Weather Station Kurt at the

14:28

Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, which is only

14:30

about 980 miles

14:32

from Kurt's original location in Labrador.

14:35

Jeff says today it is one of the

14:37

most popular artifacts at the museum. And I

14:40

mean, it does have something for everybody. You

14:42

know, technology and radio buffs, secret mission buffs,

14:45

and there's the mystery of how and why

14:47

it stopped working. On

14:49

that note, Jeff says that the installation

14:51

of Weather Station Kurt was the one

14:53

and only time that armed Nazi soldiers

14:56

in uniform landed in North America,

14:59

as far as we know. Our

15:15

podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura

15:17

and Stitcher Studios. Our

15:20

production team includes Dylan Thres,

15:22

Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka,

15:24

Camille Stanley, Manolo Morales,

15:26

Vodilaire, Gabby Gladney, Johanna

15:28

Mayer. Our technical director

15:30

is Casey Holford. This

15:33

episode was mixed by Luce Fleming.

15:36

Our theme in end credit music is by Sam

15:38

Tindall. And if you'd like to learn more about

15:40

what you heard today, you can head over to

15:42

our website at atlasobscura.com. There is a

15:44

link in the episode description. I'm

15:46

Amanda McGowan, wishing you all the wonder in the

15:48

world. I'll see you next time. for

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