- 5 days ago
A German submarine landed on the coast of Labrador, built a secret weather station on an Arctic hilltop, and got away with it for 38 years. The story of Weather Station Kurt is a World War II mystery, military history, and Canadian war story all at once, tracing how U-537 carried men, equipment, and deception ashore in Martin Bay in October 1943.
The station was disguised with black-and-white paint, empty cigarette packets, and the false name “Canadian Meteor Service,” then left to transmit North Atlantic weather back to Germany. Decades later, Canadian historian Wab Douglas and German records finally connected the landing, the air attacks off Newfoundland, and the abandoned drums on the ridge. The film also follows the Inuit coast, the fear of being discovered, and the later recovery of the site by helicopter and icebreaker.
For viewers who enjoy WWII history, naval warfare, Arctic operations, Canadian military history, and narrated historical mysteries, this is a gripping deep dive into a little-known Atlantic story. It also fits searches for war stories, history documentary narration, Labrador history, U-boat operations, and secret weather station history.
SEO: World War II documentary, Canadian war stories, military history, U-boat history, Arctic history, Labrador history, narrated history, historical mystery, naval warfare, and WWII stories for history fans.
The station was disguised with black-and-white paint, empty cigarette packets, and the false name “Canadian Meteor Service,” then left to transmit North Atlantic weather back to Germany. Decades later, Canadian historian Wab Douglas and German records finally connected the landing, the air attacks off Newfoundland, and the abandoned drums on the ridge. The film also follows the Inuit coast, the fear of being discovered, and the later recovery of the site by helicopter and icebreaker.
For viewers who enjoy WWII history, naval warfare, Arctic operations, Canadian military history, and narrated historical mysteries, this is a gripping deep dive into a little-known Atlantic story. It also fits searches for war stories, history documentary narration, Labrador history, U-boat operations, and secret weather station history.
SEO: World War II documentary, Canadian war stories, military history, U-boat history, Arctic history, Labrador history, narrated history, historical mystery, naval warfare, and WWII stories for history fans.
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LearningTranscript
00:00October 22nd, 1943.
00:03Martin Bay, on the northern tip of Labrador, a few miles south of Cape Chidley.
00:08There is fog on the water, and inside that fog a German submarine is lying at anchor
00:13with her hatches open.
00:15She cannot dive.
00:17Weeks earlier, out in the mid-Atlantic, a breaker came over the bridge of U-537 with
00:23enough force to tear her four-barreled anti-aircraft gun off its mounting and throw it into the
00:28sea.
00:29The same wave opened leaks in her hull, so the boat that has just crossed the most heavily
00:34patrolled water on earth is now sitting still, in daylight, inside a bay that Canadians are
00:40supposed to be watching, with nothing to shoot at an aircraft, and no way to go under.
00:46On the shore, a German sailor with a rifle is backing up a slope of wet rock, and he is
00:51not
00:51looking at the sea.
00:52He is looking at the ridge line behind him, at the strip of grey sky above it, because
00:57that is where the thing that kills him will come from.
01:00Below him, nine more of them are rustling canisters out of rubber boats.
01:05Ten canisters, each about the height of a man's waist, each weighing roughly 220 pounds, and
01:11every one of them has to go 400 yards inland and up a hill.
01:15Two men in the party are not sailors at all.
01:18One is a meteorologist, Dr. Kurt Sommermeier.
01:21The other is his technician, Walter Hildebrandt.
01:25They have come 4,000 miles to build a machine on a hillside in Labrador.
01:30And here is the detail I want you to hold onto, because everything that follows for the next
01:3438 years hangs on it.
01:37Before they leave, they paint the canisters black and white to match the rock.
01:42They scatter empty American cigarette packets around the site.
01:45And stenciled on the metal, in English, are three words naming an organization that has
01:51never existed in any country on earth.
01:55Canadian Meteor Service.
01:57They were dressing their machine up as ours.
02:00That is how certain they were that Canadians would come up that hill and find it.
02:05Nobody did.
02:07Not that autumn.
02:08Not that war.
02:10It stood on that hill, in the open, for 38 years.
02:15If what Canadians did on this coast matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach
02:20the people who still remember it.
02:23Now let me take you forward.
02:25July 21st, 1981.
02:27The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, Louis S. St. Laurent, drops anchor 16 nautical miles
02:34off that same coast, because there is nowhere closer a ship of her size can safely sit.
02:40A Bell helicopter lifts off her deck and runs in towards the Torn Gat cliffs.
02:45Inside it is a 52-year-old Canadian with a set of old German photographs on his knees.
02:50His name is Alec Douglas.
02:53Officially, Dr. W.A.B. Douglas.
02:57Official historian of the Canadian Armed Forces.
03:00Which means that if an armed German landing happened on this coast, the paperwork proving
03:05it ought to be sitting in his own building in Ottawa.
03:07He had spent more than 20 years in the Royal Canadian Navy before that, a navigation and
03:13operations officer in ships like Ottawa and Swansea.
03:17And he had arrived in this country in the first place as a small boy, shipped across
03:22the Atlantic to get him away from German bombs, in the years when U-boats were sinking the
03:27ships that carried children.
03:28A German researcher had written to him, claiming there was a Nazi weather station in Labrador.
03:34Douglas went looking in Canadian records and found nothing at all.
03:38No report, no sighting, no file.
03:41His own words about it were careful.
03:44He was, he said, intrigued but skeptical.
03:48The helicopter put him down on a ledge of bare rock.
03:51It was all there.
03:52The mast, the tripod.
03:54Ten canisters, weathered but unmistakable, lying on a hill above Martin Bay, exactly where
04:01a German photograph, taken in 1943, said they would be.
04:06Now I could stop the story here, and most tellings of it do.
04:10Germans landed in Canada, nobody noticed.
04:13Wasn't that embarrassing?
04:15That version is short, it is popular, and it is wrong.
04:19The men on that beach did not believe they were getting away with anything.
04:22They were frightened of us.
04:24They built deception into the paint.
04:26And within nine days of weighing anchor in that bay, that same submarine had Canadian
04:31aircraft coming at her out of the cloud.
04:33Twice inside one week, and the second time close enough to hurt her.
04:37So the question we are actually chasing is not why Canada missed them.
04:41Hold that thought, because it is going to turn over on you at least twice.
04:44The real question is how a machine standing upright on North American ground, in the open,
04:50kept it secret for 38 years.
04:53When a Canadian scientist eventually walked right up to it, photographed it, gave it a
04:57catalog number, and still had no idea what he was looking at.
05:01One more thing before we go back to the war, and this is the piece that has never been properly
05:06explained.
05:07Working over the site that afternoon, Douglas found that every single canister had been opened.
05:12The contents were strewn across a hundred feet of hillside.
05:17Batteries and radio parts had not been smashed by weather or torn apart by bears.
05:21They had been dismantled, carefully, in order.
05:25Somebody had been here first.
05:28And underneath one of the canisters, lying on the rock, Douglas picked up a single rifle
05:33cartridge.
05:34Not German.
05:35The stamp on the base read British Dominion.
05:38Whoever fired that round had stood on this hill long before he did.
05:42And to understand what that cartridge is doing there, you first have to understand why Germany
05:47was desperate enough to put a submarine crew ashore in North America at all.
05:51It was not an act of confidence.
05:53It was the move of a navy that had already lost something, and knew it.
05:58October 26th, 1943.
06:00Four days after the Germans walked back down that hill in Labrador, and 600 miles out into
06:06the Atlantic, a Canadian Liberator is coming down through cloud at 75 feet above the water.
06:13The pilot is Flight Lieutenant R. M. Aldwinkel, No. 10 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron, Royal
06:18Canadian Air Force, flying out of Gairden.
06:21He has been sent to join convoy ON-207, and at one minute past 11, his crew sight a U
06:28-boat
06:28on the surface, running.
06:30He attacks immediately.
06:32Six depth charges go into the sea around the submarine, and nothing happens.
06:36Not one of them explodes.
06:38The hydrostatic fuses have frozen at altitude.
06:42Think about what that means for the seven men in that aircraft.
06:45They have just flown down the throat of a submarine whose gunners are now fully awake.
06:50They have spent most of what they carry, and their weapons did not work.
06:55Aldwinkel did not turn for home.
06:57He stayed over that boat for more than an hour, trading fire with it, while it tried to
07:02shake him off.
07:04At 12.12, the U-boat began to dive.
07:07He came in again, put a homing torpedo into the water behind her, and six minutes later dropped
07:12two more charges from 50 feet.
07:15The crew's report describes what came up out of the sea afterwards.
07:19The third explosion, they wrote, shot up like an oil gusher under great pressure, to a height
07:25of 50 or 60 feet.
07:26The water was stained black, with a reddish tinge.
07:30That was U-420.
07:33She never came home, and Aldwinkel's crew were credited with her.
07:37Now hold those two things side by side, because this is the hinge of the whole story.
07:43In the same week of the same October, on the same ocean, a Canadian air crew out of Newfoundland
07:49hunted a German submarine for an hour and killed it, while a second German submarine sat at anchor
07:55off Labrador for 28 hours, unable to dive, and nothing came near her at all.
08:00So no, Canada was not asleep.
08:02That is the lazy answer, and you can throw it away now.
08:06Here is the real one, and it is the first of several.
08:09Pull back and look at where Martin Bay actually is.
08:13It is at the very top of Labrador, at the doorstep of the Arctic.
08:17The nearest Canadian airbase was Goose Bay, hundreds of miles to the south, a place the
08:23RCAF had carved out of the bush only two years earlier.
08:27That October, nine cansos of 162 Squadron were sitting on it, and they flew the Labrador coast.
08:34But a flying boat has a fuel load and a horizon, and the men who planned those patrols were
08:39not sending them north into empty water for pleasure.
08:42They were sending them where the ships were.
08:44And no ship went to Martin Bay.
08:47Nothing was there to protect.
08:49The convoy road ran east from Newfoundland, hundreds of miles to the south, and that was
08:54where Aldwinkle was, because that was where the war was.
08:58Shrew had not slipped through a wall.
09:00He had gone around the end of it into a piece of coast so empty that guarding it would have
09:06been an act of imagination.
09:08Forty years later, Alec Douglas went looking for the proof of exactly this in Ottawa.
09:14He had the whole documentary estate of the Canadian Armed Forces in his hands, and he
09:19went through it for a sighting, a report, a signal, anything at all from that corner of
09:25the coast in the autumn of 1943.
09:28He found nothing.
09:30Not a line.
09:31That is why he told people he was skeptical.
09:33Because, in his experience, when something happens, a Canadian file says so.
09:40This time, the only file that said so was German.
09:43Which brings us to the question underneath the whole thing.
09:47Why would a navy fighting for its life in the Atlantic take one of its long-range submarines,
09:53one of the most valuable objects it owned, and spend it on a trip to a hillside in Labrador?
10:00Not for glory.
10:01For weather.
10:03Understand what weather was in that war, and you understand everything Shruva did.
10:09Weather in the North Atlantic moves west to east.
10:12It forms over the Canadian Arctic and Labrador and Newfoundland, and then it walks across the
10:18ocean towards Europe.
10:19Which means the men who stand on the western side of that ocean know tomorrow, and the men
10:24on the eastern side are guessing.
10:26The Allies had Canada, Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland.
10:31Germany had none of it.
10:33And what had once come to them freely over the air now came in cipher or not at all.
10:38That is not a footnote.
10:40A U-boat captain who does not know the weather does not know whether the sea will let him
10:44surface and charge his batteries.
10:47An air staff that does not know the weather cannot say whether an invasion fleet will
10:51sail.
10:52So the Germans tried to buy the weather back the hard way.
10:55They sent men to Svalbard.
10:57They put parties into Greenland, and they ordered their submarines to report conditions by radio.
11:03That last one was what killed them.
11:05Every time a U-boat pressed its transmitter, Allied direction-finding stations on both sides
11:11of the Atlantic took a bearing on it, and where those bearings crossed, an aircraft was sent.
11:16That is how crews like Altwinkels found boats in an ocean the size of Europe.
11:21A German captain reporting the barometric pressure was, in a real sense, giving his own position
11:27to a Canadian in Gander.
11:28Now look again at those ten canisters going up that hill.
11:32That is what they were.
11:34A machine that opens its mouth for two minutes, every three hours, so that no German has to.
11:40Sommermeier's answer to the problem of men who die when they speak.
11:44And one last thing before we follow the boat out of that bay, because it changes how you
11:48see the man on the bridge.
11:50Shrua did not pick the top of Labrador only because it was empty of Canadian aircraft.
11:55According to the German account of the operation, he pushed that far north for another reason
12:00entirely.
12:01He was trying to keep his machine away from one particular set of eyes.
12:05They were not soldiers.
12:07They carried no radios and filed no reports.
12:10They had been living along that coast for a very long time, and they had the run of every
12:15bay on it.
12:16He was right to worry about them.
12:18He was just wrong about how long it would take.
12:26Shrua brings U-537 in under fog, feeling his way along a coast nobody on board has ever
12:32seen, into an anchorage just inside Martin Bay.
12:36There is no chart worth the name for this place.
12:39There are cliffs, and there is brown rock, and above it the Torngat Mountains, which are
12:45the oldest and emptiest thing on the eastern edge of the continent.
12:49The first rubber boat goes over the side carrying armed men, and the first thing those men do
12:55when they get their feet on the rock is not unload.
12:58It is to spread out and look for people.
13:01That is worth sitting with for a moment.
13:04Ten sailors with rifles, on a beach in Labrador, searching a shoreline for human beings.
13:10Because Shrua's problem was never the Royal Canadian Air Force.
13:14He had already worked out, correctly, that no Canadian patrol line ran this far north.
13:20His problem was that somebody lived here.
13:22Here is the thing the German planners knew, and most people telling this story leave out.
13:27The coast of northern Labrador is not empty of people, and never has been.
13:32It is Inuit country.
13:34Forty kilometers to the southwest of where the rubber boats grounded lies Killinik, Port
13:40Burwell, a harbor that had drawn families, and a mission, and a trading post, and at one
13:45time a detachment of mounted police.
13:48The post had closed a few years before the war.
13:51The people had not gone anywhere.
13:53They moved with the char and the seal, up and down exactly this piece of coast, and they
13:59went where the hunting was, which meant they could be in any bay on any given week.
14:03German records are blunt about it.
14:06Shrua pushed as far north as he dared, specifically to reduce the chance that Inuit would find
14:11the station.
14:12So remember what we are actually watching.
14:15This is not a swaggering raid on North America.
14:18This is a crew that cannot dive, in daylight, on a hostile shore, hurrying.
14:23And the danger they are hurrying away from is a hunter with a rifle.
14:27They worked for something close to 28 hours.
14:3010 canisters came out of the boats, each around 220 pounds of steel and battery, and each
14:36one had to be manhandled up roughly 400 yards of broken rock to a hilltop about 170 feet
14:42above the bay.
14:43Sailors do not train for this.
14:46There is no road, no beach worth the word, no cover.
14:50Every trip up and down, somebody was watching that ridge line.
14:53At the top, the two men who were not sailors went to work.
14:57Sommermeier set the tripod and raised the mast, 10 meters of it, and Hildebrandt wired the
15:02instruments in.
15:04Temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed, wind direction.
15:08Feeding a transmitter that would gather a reading, turn it into morse, and fire it at Northern
15:13Europe for two minutes, every three hours, day and night, on a fixed frequency.
15:18The batteries were built to carry it for months.
15:23Then they dressed it.
15:24They painted the canisters black and white to break up against the rock.
15:28They scattered empty American cigarette packets around the hilltop, the kind of rubbish any
15:34allied working party would leave behind.
15:37And on the metal, they had already stenciled those words in English, Canadian Meteor Service.
15:44I want to slow down on that label, because it tells you exactly who the Germans were afraid
15:49of.
15:50No such service existed.
15:53There was a Canadian Meteorological Service, and it was not called that.
15:58And there is a second thing wrong with it, which almost nobody notices.
16:02In 1943, Labrador was not Canada.
16:06It belonged to the Dominion of Newfoundland, which did not join Confederation until 1949.
16:15The Germans were standing on Newfoundland ground, painting a Canadian label on a machine, to fool
16:21people who were neither.
16:23But the instinct behind it was sound, and that is the point.
16:27They did not write that label for a general or an intelligence officer.
16:30They wrote it for whoever walked up that hill next, a hunter, a fisherman, a trapper, somebody
16:38who would see official-looking English on a government-looking drum and leave it alone.
16:43They were building a lie sized for a civilian.
16:47That is how sure they were that a soldier would never come.
16:51And then Sommermeier did the thing that hangs him.
16:54He took photographs of the site, of the hill, of the canisters standing finished on the ridge
17:02above Martin Bay.
17:03A meteorologist documenting his installation, the way a man does when he is proud of a piece
17:10of equipment he designed, and wants the record to show it was properly sighted.
17:15Hold on to that camera.
17:17Nothing else in this story survives.
17:19The station will fail, the submarine will be lost with every man aboard.
17:23The war will end.
17:25The files will scatter across two continents.
17:28And in the end, the entire case will rest on a German scientist's holiday-sized snapshots
17:34of a hillside.
17:36On the afternoon of the 23rd of October, at twenty minutes to six, satisfied the machine
17:42was talking, Shrew weighed anchor and took his boat back out to sea.
17:46Behind him, on a hill nobody had any reason to visit, a steel drum stenciled with the name
17:52of a country that did not own that coast began transmitting the weather of North America to
17:57Germany.
17:58Thirty-eight years later, a Canadian in a helicopter would hold Sommermeier's photographs up against
18:04the skyline of the Torn Gats, match the ridge, and put down within walking distance of the
18:09spot, and then start picking up pieces of that same machine and one cartridge case that was
18:15never German.
18:16But Kurt was only half of Shrew's orders.
18:19The other half was the reason a Type 9 boat had crossed the Atlantic in the first place,
18:24and it had nothing to do with weather.
18:26He now had to go south and sink Canadian-escorted shipping off Newfoundland, with a damaged haul
18:32and no anti-aircraft guns.
18:35He had eight days before the sky over him opened up.
18:3831st of October, 1943, off the Newfoundland coast, eight days after Martin Bay.
18:45A Hudson of 11, Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, is working a patrol
18:51line out of Tor Bay, a squadron that had moved onto that airfield only days before, and whose
18:56crews had already made more attacks on U-boats than any other unit in the Canadian Air Force.
19:02Under the Hudson's wings are rails carrying rocket projectiles.
19:06The pilot sees the submarine and goes for it.
19:09Eight rockets leave the rails.
19:11Every one of them misses.
19:12Now put yourself on the bridge of U-537 and watch that happen, because this is the moment
19:18the voyage changes character.
19:20For six weeks, Shrew's crew have been at sea.
19:23They have been through a storm that nearly opened the boat up.
19:26They have crossed 4,000 miles of the Atlantic.
19:29Come into an empty Canadian-watched bay, spent a day and a night ashore on North American
19:35rock, and gone away again.
19:37And in all that time, not one shot has been fired at them by anybody.
19:43Then they turn south, into the water where Canadian ships actually sail.
19:48And within a week, the sky opens.
19:51Eight streaks of smoke go past the boat and into the sea.
19:55Nobody is killed.
19:57Nothing is hit.
19:58If you want a single image for the whole argument of this film, it is that one.
20:04The Germans got ashore in North America untouched.
20:08And the first time they went anywhere that mattered, a Canadian aircrew was on top of them
20:13inside a week.
20:14Here is the thing I want you to understand about that water.
20:18Because it is a piece of the war that even Canadians forget.
20:21From the spring of 1943, the Northwest Atlantic, the whole vast box of ocean from the Gulf of
20:29Maine up past Newfoundland and out towards the mid-ocean, was a Canadian theatre of war.
20:34Not a Canadian contribution to a British one, a theatre, with a Canadian commander-in-chief,
20:41Rear Admiral Leonard Murray, running convoy and air operations in it.
20:46He was the only Canadian to command an allied theatre anywhere in the Second World War, and
20:52the theatre he commanded was the one Shrew had just sailed into.
20:56That is the wall Shrew went around when he went north.
21:00Now he had come back through the gate.
21:01He hunted for ten days and found nothing to kill.
21:05This is easy to say and worth slowing down on.
21:09A Type 9 submarine, the long-range boat, the one built to go far and sink ships, spent the
21:15best part of a fortnight prowling the approaches to a major allied port, and never fired a torpedo
21:21at a merchant ship.
21:23The convoys were routed around him.
21:25The escorts were where he wanted to be.
21:27The sea in front of him was empty in exactly the way a defended sea is empty.
21:3410th of November.
21:35A Kanso of five bomber reconnaissance squadron out of Gander catches him off Cape Race and
21:41puts four depth charges into the water around the hull.
21:44The boat survives it.
21:4711th of November.
21:48The next day, another Kanso of the same squadron finds him again and drops four more.
21:54This time, the boat is damaged.
21:56Think about what that is like inside.
21:58Two days running, in the same patch of ocean, an aircraft comes out of the cloud and the sea
22:04slams the hull around you.
22:06You are eight days short of a home port that is 4,000 miles away.
22:11And you now know the Canadians have a fix on roughly where you live.
22:15Ships were called in behind the aircraft to hunt him.
22:18He went deep and quiet and they lost him.
22:21And he crawled home, reaching port on the 8th of December.
22:24So, let us total up what the great German landing in North America actually achieved at sea.
22:30Peter Shreve commanded U-537 for almost two years, made three war patrols, and spent 208
22:37days at sea.
22:38In all of it, he sank nothing.
22:41Not one ship.
22:43Not one.
22:44I am not telling you that to sneer at him.
22:47He was, by every account, a careful and capable officer who brought a damaged boat across the
22:53Atlantic and back again and did a difficult piece of engineering work on a hostile shore.
22:58I am telling you because of what it says about the title of this story.
23:02He got away with the part that did not matter.
23:05The part that mattered, sinking Allied shipping in Canadian waters, Canadians stopped him from
23:10doing at all.
23:12And now here is the detail that turns this part over.
23:15Those attacks are in Canadian files.
23:18Both Kansos filed reports.
23:20The Hudson crew filed a report.
23:21Somewhere in the records of Eastern Air Command, there has been, since 1943, a paper trail
23:27on the boat that landed men in Labrador.
23:30Canada had the submarine all along.
23:32It just had it as a number.
23:34Nobody on this side of the ocean had the faintest idea that the thing being depth-charged off
23:39Cape Race had, nine days earlier, put 12 men and 10 steel drums onto a Canadian hilltop.
23:46The attacks and the landing sat in two different filing cabinets on two different continents, and
23:51the war ended with nobody holding both.
23:54When Alec Douglas came to this in the 1980s, he was the one man in the country best place
23:59to see it, because writing the official histories of the Canadian Navy and Air Force was his
24:04actual job.
24:05He could pull those squadron records.
24:07He could put the German log beside them and line the dates up, day by day, and watch the
24:13two halves of the story finally meet almost 40 years late.
24:17But while Shrew was running for home with a damaged boat and nothing to show for it, the
24:21other half of his mission was already going wrong on that hill.
24:25The station had started well.
24:28Kurt came up on schedule, and Germany began receiving North American weather for the first
24:32time in the war.
24:33Then the signals started to degrade.
24:36Within days they were unreliable.
24:38By the middle of November they had stopped altogether, and German meteorologists sat in
24:43front of a receiver waiting for a machine that never spoke again.
24:47They never found out why, and the explanation people usually give you, bad batteries, bad luck,
24:53arctic cold, is not the only one on the table.
25:11Another German submarine, U-518, has just put a man ashore in a rubber boat.
25:17His name is Werner Von Janowski.
25:19He is a trained agent with money, a radio, and orders to get to Montreal.
25:24He does everything right up to the shoreline.
25:28Then he walks into a Canadian village.
25:30At half past six he presents himself at the hotel in New Carlisle as William Brinton and
25:36asks for a room with a bath.
25:38And behind the desk is the owner's son, Earl Annette Jr., who begins to notice things.
25:44The suit is cut wrong, European.
25:47The matches are Belgian.
25:49The man says he came in by bus, but no bus ran into New Carlisle that morning, and Annette
25:55knows it because Annette lives there.
25:57There is a smell about him that does not belong on a commercial traveler.
26:01So a young man in a hotel in Quebec does the arithmetic on a stranger and comes up with the
26:06right answer.
26:07He goes to the Quebec Provincial Police.
26:10Constable Alphonse Ducheneau takes the description, gets to the station, and boards the train as
26:15it is pulling out.
26:16He finds the passenger.
26:18He says the name Brinton, and the man answers to it, and says he sells radios in Toronto.
26:23And then, sitting on a moving train in the gas bay, the whole thing comes apart, and Janowski
26:29confesses.
26:29He had been on Canadian soil for about four hours.
26:32They turned him, by the way.
26:34The German's agent in Canada spent the rest of his war transmitting to Hamburg under Canadian
26:39control.
26:40This country's first double agent.
26:42Now hold that hotel lobby up against the hill at Martin Bay, because together, they answer
26:47the question this film started with.
26:49Canada's real defense against a man coming ashore was never a radar line or a beach patrol.
26:55You cannot fence an eastern coastline that long.
26:58Canada's defense was people.
27:01Outport Newfoundlanders, gas bay villagers, fishermen, lighthouse keepers, families who had
27:07lived in the same bays for generations, and who could tell you which boat was out, and
27:11whose truck that was, and that the man at the hotel desk was wrong somehow.
27:16A stranger in those communities was not invisible.
27:19A stranger was the event of the week.
27:22Shrew was not dodging Canadian technology when he went north.
27:26He was dodging Canadian neighbors.
27:28He went to the one stretch of coast where nobody would be looking over his shoulder.
27:33And even there, the first thing his men did was sweep the shoreline for human beings.
27:38And the first thing his scientists did was paint an English label on the drums in case
27:43someone came.
27:44Which brings us back to what happened on that hilltop after the submarine left.
27:49And this is where the story stops being tidy.
27:53Kurt worked.
27:54That has to be said plainly.
27:56The machine came up on schedule, sent its two minutes of Morse, and for the first time
28:01in the war, German meteorologists were reading the weather of North America off a station of
28:06their own, standing on the far side of the Atlantic.
28:10Within days, the signals were coming through degraded.
28:13By the middle of November, there was nothing at all.
28:16The usual explanations are the dull ones.
28:19Batteries fail an arctic cold.
28:21Something in the set gave out.
28:23There may have been interference on the frequency.
28:26The Germans themselves wondered about jamming.
28:29Any of those is possible, and no document settles it.
28:32But when Alec Douglas got up onto that hill in 1981, he did not find a machine that had
28:38quietly run down.
28:39He found ten canisters, with every single one of them opened.
28:44He found the contents spread across a hundred feet of hillside.
28:47And what he wrote about the parts is the line that stays with you.
28:51The batteries and radio components seemed to have been systematically dismantled, not smashed,
28:57not scattered by weather, taken apart, in an order, by somebody who was working at it.
29:05And underneath one of those canisters, that rifle cartridge stamped British Dominion.
29:12Here is what an honest historian does with that.
29:14And Douglas was an honest one.
29:16He said he did not know.
29:18He could not date the dismantling.
29:21Somebody could have been up there in 1944, or 1954, or 1970.
29:27There is no document, no confession, no report.
29:31The evidence tells you a human being with a rifle stood on that hill, and went through
29:37a German weather station with their hands.
29:39And it will not tell you when.
29:42But now put it next to what we already know about Shrew's thinking, and see what it does
29:46to the shape of this story.
29:49He pushed his submarine as far north as he dared for one stated reason.
29:54To keep the station away from Inuit eyes.
29:56The coast he chose was Inuit country.
29:59Families moved through those bays with the season and the char, as they had done for longer
30:04than there had been a Germany.
30:05He had picked, out of the entire eastern seaboard of North America, a hillside belonging
30:11to the one group of people he had specifically identified as the threat to his secret.
30:15And every canister he left there was found opened.
30:19I am not going to pretend to you that this is proven.
30:22It is not.
30:23What I will say is that the label those Germans painted on the drums tells you what they feared,
30:29and the state of those drums in 1981 tells you the fear was well placed.
30:34And that the story of Germany's one installation in North America may well end with local hunters
30:39quietly taking it to pieces and walking off with the useful parts, decades before Ottawa
30:44knew it existed.
30:45The men who might have explained any of it, who could have told Germany whether Kurt froze,
30:50failed or was stripped, were the twelve who built it and the crew that carried them.
30:55They had a little over a year left.
30:58And when their boat went down, it took with it every living witness to the only armed German
31:03landing on this continent.
31:05Which is the real reason a machine stood in the open on Canadian ground for 38 years without
31:12a single person coming to look for it.
31:149th of November, 1944.
31:17Almost 13 months after Martin Bay, and half a world away from it, U-537 slips out of Sudabaya
31:25in Japanese-occupied Java.
31:27She is a long way from the Atlantic now.
31:31Germany's Far East boats were running between Penang and Japan carrying cargo that mattered
31:36more than torpedoes.
31:38Rubber, tin, tungsten.
31:40And Peter Shrew has brought his submarine all the way around the world to do it.
31:4626 minutes after midnight on the 10th, in the Java Sea east of Sudabaya, an American submarine
31:52called Flounder puts torpedoes into her.
31:56She goes down with every man aboard.
31:59Fifty-eight officers and men.
32:02Shrew was thirty years old, an East Prussian, at sea in command since the beginning of 1943.
32:09It is one of the strangest small facts of the war that the boat which landed on North America
32:14was killed by an American submarine in the tropics, on the other side of the planet, by
32:20men who had never heard of Labrador.
32:23And now count who was aboard her.
32:24The two scientists had left long before.
32:28Sommermeier and Hildebrandt went ashore in France when the boat came home in December
32:32of 1943, and they took their papers and their photographs with them.
32:36But the sailors did not go anywhere.
32:39The men who wrestled those canisters out of the rubber boats, who carried 220 pounds
32:44of steel up 400 yards of Labrador rock, who stood on that ridge with a rifle watching
32:50the sky, they were still in her.
32:53At twenty-six minutes past midnight in the Java Sea, every man who had walked up that
32:59hill and come back down it went to the bottom in one piece of water.
33:04That is the first real answer to the question this film is chasing, and I want to give it
33:08to you plainly.
33:09The German landing in North America stayed secret for 38 years because the witnesses died, all
33:17of them, at once, in a place that had nothing to do with it.
33:20There was no prisoner to interrogate, no survivor to talk in a bar in Kiel in 1946.
33:27No crewman's memoir.
33:29The operation had been small, secret, and unsuccessful.
33:34And then the people who performed it were erased in a single night in an ocean 11,000 miles
33:40away.
33:42The war ended.
33:43German records went into allied hands by the truckload, and then into archives, where they
33:49sat unread in the millions of pages, because there is always more paper than there are historians.
33:56And a steel mast stood on a hill in Labrador, holding up nothing in the open.
34:04Now, I said earlier that the lazy answer is that nobody ever found it.
34:09Here is where that falls apart.
34:11And this is the part of the story that genuinely surprised me.
34:16People found it.
34:18More than once.
34:201977.
34:22There is a joint archaeological project working the Torngat coast, Smithsonian-backed, with
34:27Canadian and American specialists.
34:29And one of the people on it is a geomorphologist named Peter Johnson.
34:34His job is the land itself.
34:36The rock, the ice history, the shape of the coast.
34:40Working above Martin Bay, he comes across canisters and a collapsed antenna on a hilltop.
34:47He does exactly what a careful professional does.
34:50He records the site.
34:51He gives it a name from the nearest landmark, Martin Bay 7, and enters it with a site number
34:57in the National Archaeological Register, where it sits to this day.
35:02And then he walks away.
35:06Because he has concluded it is a Canadian military installation.
35:10Old government kit.
35:11There was a fair amount of it scattered around the north by then.
35:16Read that again.
35:1734 years after Kurt Sommermeier painted a false Canadian label on a German drum, a Canadian
35:24scientist stood in front of that drum, looked at it properly, wrote it down, and was fooled
35:30by a dead man's paint.
35:32That is the second answer, and it is better than the first.
35:36The station did not survive because it was hidden.
35:40It survived because it was wearing our name.
35:43There is one more finding, and it may be the most important of all.
35:47And it did not come from a scientist.
35:49In August of that same year, 1977, two Inuit men were char-fishing in that country.
35:55Michael Keelan and his brother-in-law, Paul Gerarus.
35:58Keelan came across material lying on the ground.
36:01In his own description, he saw a bunch of papers and batteries lying there, and when
36:06he went to look at them, there were strange writings on them.
36:10Strange Writings.
36:11German.
36:12When he asked about it afterwards, elders told him about a weather station up there that
36:16had not been American.
36:18So the knowledge existed.
36:20It existed on that coast, among the people who used it.
36:23The very people Shrew had pushed his submarine north to avoid.
36:27It simply existed in a form that never traveled to Ottawa, because nobody in Ottawa was asking,
36:33and because in the 1970s, the traffic of information between the far north and the capital ran almost
36:39entirely in one direction.
36:41Let me put the whole picture together as it stood in 1978.
36:46A German landing on this continent had happened.
36:48A German machine still stood where it had been placed.
36:52At least one Canadian scientist had documented it.
36:55At least one Inuit hunter had handled its papers.
36:58The Canadian Armed Forces had files on the submarine that did it, and not one of those
37:03pieces knew about any of the others.
37:06Every element of the answer was already in Canadian hands, in four separate places, with
37:12no one holding two of them at once.
37:15What it needed was a person whose whole professional life was putting Canadian records and German records
37:21on the same desk.
37:22That man existed.
37:24He was sitting in Ottawa, running the History Directorate of the Canadian Armed Forces,
37:29and he had never heard of Martin Bay.
37:32Meanwhile, in West Germany, a retired Siemens engineer was going through the working papers
37:36of the company's wartime weather program for a history he was writing.
37:40And in one of those files were a set of photographs, taken in October 1943 by a meteorologist who
37:47was now long dead, of ten steel drums standing on a nameless ridge above an arctic bay.
37:531980.
37:54An envelope from West Germany lands on a desk in Ottawa.
37:58The man it is addressed to is Dr. W.A.B. Douglas, Director of History at National Defense Headquarters,
38:06the officer responsible for the official record of what the Canadian forces did in the war.
38:11The letter is from Franz Selinger, a retired Siemens engineer with no official standing at all,
38:17writing a history of the German wartime weather service.
38:21And its claim is this.
38:22In October 1943, a German submarine put an automatic weather station ashore in northern Labrador.
38:30Douglas' reaction was the correct one for a professional, and he never dressed it up afterwards.
38:35He was, in his words, intrigued but skeptical.
38:39Understand his position.
38:41He is being told that an armed enemy landing took place on North American soil,
38:46and that his own country's armed forces never knew.
38:49He has the Canadian documentary record of that war effectively at his elbow.
38:54So he goes into it.
38:56There is nothing.
38:57No sighting report.
38:58No signal.
38:59No file.
39:02From the Canadian side, in October 1943, that stretch of coast is silent.
39:08For most people that would be the end of it.
39:11A nice story, no evidence, move on.
39:13It was not the end of it for Douglas, because of the specific way he had been trained to think.
39:20Twenty-odd years as a navigating and operations officer in Canadian warships, then a doctorate,
39:26then a career spent writing the official histories of the Navy and the Air Force.
39:31That work is nothing but the discipline of laying two records side by side and asking whether they agree.
39:37And Selinger had brought two records with him.
39:41The first was the war diary of U-537.
39:45The boat's own log, kept hour by hour, giving the approach, the anchorage inside Martin Bay,
39:51the dates, the times, the twenty-eight hours of work, the moment the anchor came up on the afternoon of
39:57the twenty-third.
39:58The second was photographs.
40:01Kurt Sommermeier had photographed his installation, the drums, the mast, the skyline behind it.
40:07So Douglas did what he had spent his professional life doing.
40:11He took the German log and put the Canadian files next to it.
40:15The submarine's own account of where she went after leaving Labrador.
40:19The Royal Canadian Air Force's account of what it attacked and when.
40:2431st of October, 11 Squadrons Hudson, the Rockets, the Miss.
40:2910th and 11th of November, 5 Squadrons Kansos off Cape Race, the depth charges, the damage.
40:37The dates match, the positions match.
40:41The boat the RCAF had been hammering off Newfoundland was the boat in the German log,
40:47on the days the German log said she was there.
40:49Which meant that if the Canadian records could be trusted about the second half of that patrol,
40:55the German record could be trusted about the first.
40:58That is the moment the thing became real.
41:01Not a discovery in the field.
41:04A Canadian historian at a desk, cross-checking an enemy document against his own Air Force's combat reports,
41:11and finding they fit.
41:13Everything after that was logistics.
41:15Logistics in Labrador means the Coast Guard.
41:19In July 1981, the icebreaker Louis S. Saint Laurent was working north.
41:25Douglas and Selinger went with her.
41:27On the 21st, she came up on the top of Labrador and anchored 16 nautical miles off,
41:33because that coast gives a big ship nothing closer.
41:36The helicopter on her deck was a small bell.
41:39It lifted off and ran in towards the Torn Gats with a German engineer,
41:44a Canadian historian, and a set of 38-year-old photographs.
41:48Picture how they navigated the last part of it.
41:51Not with coordinates, with a skyline.
41:54Holding up a dead meteorologist's snapshot and matching the shape of the ridge
41:58against the shape of the ridge in front of them.
42:00When the two lined up, they put down on a ledge of bare rock.
42:05It was there.
42:06The tripod.
42:07The mast.
42:08Ten canisters lying on the hill above Martin Bay.
42:12Weathered, rusting, and absolutely unmistakable.
42:16The only German military installation ever placed on the soil of North America.
42:22Standing in the open where nine men had carried it in 1943.
42:27And the sight had been worked over.
42:30Every canister had been opened.
42:32The contents lay scattered across a hundred feet of hillside.
42:36The batteries and radio parts, Douglas wrote,
42:39seemed to have been systematically dismantled.
42:42And beneath one of the drums, on the rock,
42:45that single rifle cartridge.
42:47Not German.
42:49Stamped British Dominion.
42:51He turned it over in his hand, and he could not answer it.
42:55He said so in print, which is the mark of the man.
42:59Somebody with a rifle had been on that hill before him.
43:02There is no date on a cartridge.
43:05Now here is the decision that ends the 38 years.
43:09And it is a small, unglamorous, entirely Canadian one.
43:13They did not photograph it and leave it to rot.
43:16They took it out.
43:18Canisters, instruments, the transmitter, off that hilltop, into the helicopter,
43:23onto a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, and home.
43:27Today, what is left of Weather Station Kurt is in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
43:32Germany's only installation on this continent finished its journey as a Canadian exhibit,
43:37brought in by a Canadian ship, recovered by a Canadian naval officer,
43:41who had come to this country as a child refugee from the same war.
43:45And when you stand the whole thing up, the meaning of it turns completely inside out.
43:51Germany came ashore here because Canada had taken the weather away from them.
43:55They went to the top of Labrador because Canadians lived everywhere else.
44:00They painted a Canadian name on their machine because a Canadian was the person they expected to meet.
44:07The machine died within weeks.
44:09The submarine sank nothing in two years of war.
44:12Her crew was lost with all hands.
44:15And the one physical object they left behind was carried off by the country they were hiding from.
44:21That is not a story about Canada being caught out.
44:24That is a story about how small a German could make himself on this coast and still fail.
44:31There is only one loose end and Douglas never tied it.
44:35Someone got to that hilltop before the historians.
44:38Someone with a rifle, patient hands, and no interest whatever in what Ottawa or Berlin thought they owned.
44:45And the strongest clue about who that was had already been spoken aloud,
44:50four years earlier, by a man fishing for char.
44:53Go back one last time to the beginning of this story.
44:57The 22nd of October, 1943.
45:00A German sailor on a slope of wet rock above Martin Bay with a rifle in his hands,
45:05not watching the sea but watching the ridge line behind him,
45:09waiting for the thing that comes over the top and ends him.
45:14Nothing came over that ridge, not that day.
45:18He got back into the rubber boat and the submarine took him away,
45:21and thirteen months later he went to the bottom of the Java Sea.
45:25But he was not wrong to watch it.
45:28He had the direction right, and the century's most ordinary problem with timing.
45:34Something did come over that ridge, eventually.
45:37It came in a helicopter off a Canadian icebreaker,
45:40and it was a 52-year-old Canadian with a German photograph on his knee,
45:45and it took the whole thing away.
45:48Now, the loose end.
45:50The best answer we have about who was on that hilltop before the historians
45:54does not come from an archive.
45:56It comes from two men fishing for char in the summer of 1977,
46:01Michael Keelan and Paul Gerarus,
46:03and from what Keelan saw lying on the ground,
46:06papers and batteries with strange writings on them,
46:10and from what the elders told him afterwards,
46:13which was that the station up there had never been American.
46:18Put that beside what Douglas found four years later.
46:21Every drum opened, the parts taken down in order, by hand.
46:26A single rifle cartridge stamped British Dominion lying under a canister.
46:31It cannot be proven, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
46:35But the likeliest reading of that hillside is this.
46:38The people of that coast knew about Germany's machine long before Ottawa did,
46:44and made practical use of it,
46:45and carried the knowledge quietly in the community for decades.
46:49And Peter Shrew, who took his submarine as far north as he dared
46:53for the single stated purpose of keeping his station away from Inuit eyes,
46:58failed at that too.
47:00What became of the rest of them?
47:02Peter Shrew was 30 when he died,
47:05with 57 men, in the dark, in a tropical sea.
47:09Three war patrols, 208 days at sea.
47:14Not one ship sunk in the whole of it.
47:17His boat has no grave anyone visits.
47:20Kurt Sommermeier's photographs outlived their war, their purpose,
47:24and the entire operation they were meant to record.
47:27And in the end, it was his own careful documentation that walked two strangers back up his hill
47:33and put his machine in a Canadian museum case.
47:37Franz Selinger, the retired engineer, deserves a word too.
47:41He found something extraordinary in a German file, and did not sit on it or sell it.
47:46He wrote to Ottawa.
47:48That is why we know any of this.
47:50Peter Johnson's entry stands in the archaeological register to this day,
47:55exactly as he made it.
47:57Martin Bay 7.
47:58He was not careless.
48:00He was looking at a drum with official English painted on it.
48:04And he read it the way anyone would.
48:06The lie worked on him because it was a good lie,
48:09made by men who understood that the most invisible thing you can be in Canada
48:13is Canadian government property.
48:16And the air crews, the men of 10 and 11 and 5 and 162 squadrons,
48:22flying Liberators and Hudsons and Canso's off Gander and Torbay and Goose Bay
48:27into weather that killed more of them than the Germans did,
48:30over an ocean that Canada was running.
48:33Aldwinkle's crew, who pressed an attack for an hour with frozen fuses.
48:37The Canso captains who found the same submarine two days running
48:41and put depth charges close enough to hurt her.
48:44None of them ever knew what she had done in Labrador.
48:48As for Alec Douglas, he spent the rest of his working life
48:52on the official histories of the Canadian Navy and Air Force,
48:55was the first recipient of the CP Stacey Prize,
48:58and finished as Director General of History.
49:00The small boy who was shipped across the Atlantic to get away from the war
49:04ended up as the man who kept this country's record of it,
49:08and who, on one afternoon in July 1981,
49:12personally closed the last open file of the German war in North America.
49:17So here is what this story is actually about.
49:20Canada in 1943 was a country of about 11 and a half million people
49:25that had put an army overseas, filled the escort groups of the North Atlantic,
49:30and taken command of an entire Allied theater of war in its own ocean.
49:35It did that without the industrial mass of the United States,
49:39and without an empire's worth of manpower.
49:41And the measure of it is not a battle honor.
49:44The measure of it is this.
49:46The only way the German Navy could operate on this continent at all
49:49was to sneak 12 men onto an empty Arctic hilltop for 28 hours
49:54in a submarine that could not dive,
49:57and paint a Canadian name on their equipment,
49:59in the hope that Canadians would leave it alone.
50:02They got away with it for 38 years.
50:04They just never got anything out of it.
50:07Kurt sits in Ottawa now, in the Canadian War Museum.
50:10Rusted drums and a piece of mast brought home aboard a Canadian ship.
50:15It is the only thing Nazi Germany ever built on this continent,
50:18and it belongs to us.
50:21Thank you for staying with this one to the end.
50:23It is a strange, quiet corner of the war, and it takes patience.
50:28If you think what the Canadians did on that coast,
50:30the air crews, the escorts, the people on the outports,
50:34and the families on the Labrador shore deserves to be remembered,
50:37a like genuinely helps it find more people.
50:40And if you'd like to hear more of these, we're here every week.
50:44One last thing.
50:45If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
50:50I would be honored to hear about him in the comments,
50:52where he served, and what he told you, if he told you anything at all.