Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler's. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone 'interested him more in his youth' than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland's interior. A surviving volume from Hitler's private book collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener's Gronland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930 and inspired the 1933 adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler's personal copy of History of the Expedition, the narrative of the tragic Wegener venture, can be perused in the rare-book collection at the Library of Congress among the 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler's private library. The 198-page monograph bears his personal bookplate'ex libris, eagle, swastika'like many of the others, but is notable...
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