Nazis Beneath the Ice: The Strange Conspiracy of Operation Highjump

“The United States could be attacked by planes flying over one or both poles.” - Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, 1947

In December 1946, barely a year after the end of the Second World War, the United States Navy sent an extraordinary force towards Antarctica. Around 4,700 men, thirteen ships and dozens of aircraft headed for the most isolated continent on Earth. There was an aircraft carrier, icebreakers, seaplane tenders, cargo ships and even a submarine. At the centre of the expedition was one of the most famous polar explorers who had ever lived, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Officially, they were going to establish a research base, test equipment, train men in extreme cold and map enormous areas of Antarctica. According to one of the most persistent conspiracy theories of the 20th century, however, they were going there to fight Nazis.

The operation was officially called the United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946–1947, but it became much better known by its codename, Operation Highjump. Byrd helped organise the expedition and acted as its senior polar expert, while Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen commanded Task Force 68. It was the largest Antarctic expedition mounted up to that point and had been assembled remarkably quickly. If somebody wanted to design a perfectly innocent expedition that would later inspire conspiracy theories, sending an aircraft carrier, submarine and thousands of military personnel towards one of the least explored places on Earth was a fairly efficient way of doing it.

There were perfectly legitimate military reasons for the scale of the operation. The Second World War had demonstrated how rapidly military technology was changing and relations between the United States and Soviet Union were already deteriorating. American strategists had realised that the shortest routes between many potential targets in the United States and Soviet Union passed across the polar regions. The Navy therefore needed to know whether ships, aircraft, machinery and personnel could operate effectively in extreme cold. Antarctica provided an enormous natural laboratory in which to find out. Operation Highjump would establish a base called Little America IV, test equipment and carry out extensive aerial photography and mapping.

The expedition was genuinely military, which is an important distinction. It was not simply a collection of university professors travelling south to study penguins. The Navy wanted practical information that could be useful in a future conflict, particularly one fought in the Arctic. However, military purpose is very different from the claim that Highjump was a secret invasion force sent to destroy a Nazi fortress beneath the Antarctic ice. The aircraft used for much of the mapping work were equipped with specialist cameras, and some of the Navy's PBM Mariners had even had their normal armament removed.

\

The Nazi element of the story did not appear from nowhere. Nazi Germany really had sent an expedition to Antarctica before the Second World War. In December 1938 the ship Schwabenland sailed south carrying scientists, sailors and two aircraft. The expedition explored part of what is now Dronning Maud Land and photographed approximately 250,000 square kilometres from the air. German flags were placed at several points along the coast and swastika flags were dropped from aircraft over the interior. The Germans called the region Neuschwabenland, or New Swabia.

The reasons behind the expedition were largely economic and territorial. Germany had a huge whaling industry and wanted better access to Antarctic waters without depending upon foreign-controlled areas. Hermann Göring authorised the expedition and Germany was also interested in whatever strategic possibilities Antarctica might offer. Further expeditions were planned and a future whaling base was considered, but the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted those plans. Historians examining the surviving German records have found no evidence that the 1938–1939 expedition constructed a secret underground military installation. Unfortunately for historical accuracy, the real story already contained swastikas, secret planning and unexplored Antarctic mountains. It did not require much additional imagination.

The conspiracy received another enormous boost after Germany surrendered. On 10 July 1945, the German submarine U-530 unexpectedly arrived at Mar del Plata in Argentina. Then, on 17 August, U-977 appeared at the same port. Their late arrival immediately produced rumours that senior Nazis, perhaps even Hitler himself, had escaped aboard submarines. Hungarian exile Ladislas Szabo went considerably further and claimed that German submarines had been travelling to an Antarctic refuge sometimes called New Berchtesgaden. The idea of Nazis disappearing beneath the southern ice had been born.

The submarine crews were interrogated by Argentine, American and British authorities, which found no evidence that they had transported Hitler or established an Antarctic base. Later historical investigation also concluded that the boats could not realistically have made the supposed wartime voyages to the Antarctic coast described in the conspiracy literature. That did little to kill the story. Once secret Nazi submarines had been attached to a mysterious Antarctic base, Operation Highjump arrived at an almost suspiciously convenient moment.

Only a year later, the United States Navy appeared with thousands of men.

To believers in the conspiracy, this was no coincidence. Highjump was supposedly an invasion designed to locate and destroy the surviving Nazi installation. Later versions transformed the hidden base into something extraordinary. German scientists had supposedly developed advanced aircraft there, including disc-shaped machines resembling flying saucers. Some versions claimed that the Nazis had discovered advanced technology of unknown origin. Others introduced underground caverns, geothermal lakes, alien beings and eventually the Hollow Earth itself. Antarctica stopped being merely a continent and became something closer to the headquarters of every conspiracy theory at once.

There was one genuine tragedy during Highjump that later became part of the mythology. A PBM Mariner flying through poor weather struck an uncharted Antarctic mountain ridge and exploded. Three men were killed while six survived the crash and were forced to remain on the ice for almost two weeks before being rescued. Later conspiracy accounts dramatically increased the losses, claiming several aircraft had been destroyed while fighting mysterious enemy machines. The documented record is considerably less spectacular. The Mariner was lost to the environment the expedition had specifically been sent to study: appalling weather, unknown terrain and extremely dangerous polar flying.

The operation also ended its Antarctic work earlier than originally anticipated, another fact that conspiracy writers seized upon. The expedition had initially been expected to operate for considerably longer, so its withdrawal was presented as evidence that Byrd's force had encountered something capable of driving it away. Naval records provide a less exciting explanation. Antarctic ice was growing dangerously thick as the southern summer ended. In February 1947, Admiral Cruzen and Byrd decided to evacuate Little America IV earlier than planned because there was a genuine danger that the supporting ships could become trapped by the rapidly advancing ice.

The conspiracy theory would probably have remained relatively obscure were it not for something Byrd said immediately afterwards. During an interview published by the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio on 5 March 1947, Byrd warned Americans that future enemies might attack the United States using aircraft travelling across the polar regions. It made perfect military sense. The Earth is a globe and the polar route can dramatically shorten journeys between North America and Eurasia. With long-range aircraft becoming increasingly capable and the Soviet Union emerging as America's great post-war rival, Byrd was warning that oceans and distance could no longer guarantee American security.

Over time, however, his statement underwent a remarkable transformation. Conspiracy books began quoting Byrd as warning that America could be attacked by “flying objects” capable of travelling “from pole to pole at incredible speeds”. The wording sounded considerably more like UFOs than Soviet bombers and became one of the central pieces of supposed evidence that Highjump had encountered advanced aircraft in Antarctica. Researchers later went back to the original Spanish article and found the problem. Byrd had spoken about hostile planes coming from the polar regions and aircraft capable of flying over one or both poles. The famous “flying objects” quotation was a mistranslation, or possibly something worse.

By the 1970s, the story expanded considerably. Writers including Ernst Zündel and Wilhelm Landig helped combine older tales of surviving Nazis with the increasingly popular mythology surrounding UFOs. In these versions, the Third Reich had not really disappeared in 1945. Part of it had simply retreated to Antarctica, where technologically advanced remnants continued operating from enormous underground installations. Highjump had supposedly found them, attacked them and been defeated.

There is an obvious geographical problem with this theory. The German expedition had explored Dronning Maud Land, while Byrd's main activities during Highjump were around the Ross Sea region and South Pole, roughly 2,000 kilometres away. Researchers examining the expedition records found no American landing or attack anywhere near the supposed German base. The only Highjump aircraft destroyed crashed on the opposite side of Antarctica from Dronning Maud Land. For a secret mission supposedly designed specifically to attack a Nazi installation, the Americans displayed a remarkable reluctance to actually go anywhere near it.

Then there is the problem of documentation. Operation Highjump produced photographs, maps, correspondence, expedition reports and enormous quantities of film. The National Archives still holds unedited Navy footage showing the men constructing the base, operating aircraft, testing equipment and struggling with Antarctic conditions. Ohio State University holds extensive collections of Byrd's expeditionary papers, including communications, reports and correspondence relating to Highjump. The operation certainly contained military objectives and some material was classified at the time, but secrecy during a major military expedition in the opening years of the Cold War is hardly unexpected.

Perhaps this is why the Operation Highjump conspiracy survives so successfully. Unlike stories constructed completely from imagination, it contains an extraordinary amount of truth. The Nazis really did explore Antarctica. They really did drop swastika flags onto the continent. German submarines really did appear mysteriously in Argentina after the war. The United States really did send 4,700 men and thirteen ships to Antarctica shortly afterwards. An American aircraft really did crash, men really did die and Admiral Byrd really did return warning about future attacks across the polar regions.

All that is required to create the conspiracy is to connect those facts with lines that the evidence itself does not provide.

There is no credible evidence of a Nazi fortress beneath the Antarctic ice, no documented battle between American aircraft and flying saucers and no evidence that Operation Highjump was defeated by an advanced enemy. The expedition was dangerous enough without any of them. Antarctica damaged ships, wrecked aircraft, killed three men and forced the Americans to adjust their plans simply by doing what Antarctica has always done exceptionally well: being one of the most hostile places on Earth.

Operation Highjump remains fascinating precisely because the real story sits so close to the conspiracy. It was an enormous military expedition sent into an almost unknown continent immediately after the most destructive war in human history. It involved secret planning, naval ships, aircraft crashes, Nazis, submarines and one of history's greatest polar explorers. It hardly needed flying saucers to make it interesting. Yet more than seventy years later, the image persists of Admiral Byrd sailing south with an American fleet to fight the last remnants of Hitler's Reich beneath the ice. There is no evidence that battle ever happened, but as conspiracy theories go, it has all the right ingredients.