Polar Bear Meat Ended Schatzgraber

In 1943, Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine began operating Schatzgraber, a secret World War II weather station on Alexandra Land in the Arctic Franz Josef Land archipelago. On May 30, 1944, a weather inspector named Gerhard Wallik and a soldier named Werner Blankenburg killed a polar bear, which Blankenburg served raw as steak tartare. Within a month, ten crew members developed parasitic disease trichinosis, while a vegetarian paramedic named Gerhard Hoffmann remained the only person unaffected. On July 11, a Condor aircraft carried the entire troop to Trondheim, ending the mission.

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