Alfred Ritscher, a decorated World War I naval commander who had married a prominent Jewish artist. The expedition was organized in the summer of 1938, led by Capt. In August 1936, the German Foreign Office found some unclaimed territory in Antarctica between Norwegian and British zones and an expedition to explore and claim the region between 20 degrees east and 10 degrees west-part of an area known as Queen Maud Land-took shape. German whaling ships were operating far from home, so the idea of establishing an Antarctic base seemed like a good idea.
At the time, commercial whaling had been decimated in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. So Germany began building factory whaling ships to ply the Southern Ocean.
(Credit: Institute of Regional Geography, Leipzig, Ritscher) The Schwabenland, the ship of the 1938 German Antarctic expedition. They wanted to produce whale oil by themselves.” “They had to buy whale oil from Norway before and they didn’t want to spend the currency on Norway. “To prepare for war, they needed whale oil,” says Cornelia Lüdecke, professor of the history of science at Hamburg University and co-author of the 2012 book The Third Reich in Antarctica: The German Antarctic Expedition 1938-39with Colin Summerhayes. At the time, whale oil was one of the main ingredients for margarine, and Germans ate a lot of margarine. The idea was to find substitutes for these oil- and fat-based products in case imported sources were cut off. He put Hermann Göring in charge, and then he developed a “German Fat Plan” to enable Germany to improve the efficiency of its domestic consumption of butter, milk, cream, lard, cheese, bacon, margarine, salad oils, detergents, candles, linoleum and paints. Hitler had completed a four-year plan to boost the German military and the domestic economy to be ready for war by 1940. But one small chapter in Hitler’s drive for new land is often overlooked: how the Third Reich’s hunger for margarine led to a secret expedition to Antarctica 80 years ago. Adolf Hitler used the concept of Lebensraum (“living space”) to justify the invasion of Poland, Russia and other eastern European nations to his people.
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