Second World War

The Second World War is the buried origin of the aircraft mystery on Vatnajökull and of the secrecy that continues to shape the novel long after the fighting ends. In its closing phase, a German aircraft disappears into the Icelandic ice after a covert journey connected to secret negotiations in Berlin. The crash leaves behind incompatible accounts of its passengers and cargo; the war’s uncertain ending becomes a problem of memory, evidence, and who was permitted to know what happened.

The war’s approaching end

The wartime episodes belong to a moment when defeat for Nazi Germany was becoming unavoidable, but the outcome of Europe’s political settlement remained unsettled. In the diary later read by Ratoff, the writer describes travelling through a continent marked by bomb damage, refugees, and the ongoing Battle of the Ardennes. Berlin’s airport had been destroyed, and the city was under blackout. The diary records the writer’s bewilderment at being taken into the German capital during the war and at the purpose of the negotiations there.

The secrecy was concrete, not merely an atmosphere. The diary writer was excluded from a long meeting at an aerodrome, where Nazi leaders and German generals met with two intelligence officers and an American general. The writer understood that the Swedish visitor was an old acquaintance of the German officials, but did not know what the delegates were discussing. After the meeting, the American and the Swedish visitor spoke beside the aircraft about Russia, the Ardennes, and Argentina. The writer could only wonder whether the talks concerned ending the war, shortening it, or preparing for conflict with Russia. The episode places the aircraft within a political crisis, while preserving the participant’s limited perspective rather than supplying a complete account of the negotiations.

The aircraft and its conflicting cargo stories

While the meeting continued, soldiers loaded two crates of gold bars and provisions aboard a Junkers aircraft. It was painted in American camouflage colors, a detail that complicates the distinction between the plane’s German origin and the identities or intentions of those travelling in it. The diary writer describes the Junkers as powerful, heavy-duty, and capable of long range. The meeting ran on, and the writer later blamed the delay for the aircraft encountering the storm and ice.

The crash is described as sudden and violent. In the diary, the aircraft strikes the ice in darkness amid gale-force wind, snowfall, turbulence, and ice-coated wings. Its left wing may have hit first; the propellers catch in the ice, the wings shear off, and the fuselage ploughs forward without breaking apart. The general dies on impact, as does one of the Germans. The writer, left alive in the cold, records that there had been nothing he could do to prevent the crash. The diary’s immediate details establish catastrophe, but do not resolve what the mission was meant to accomplish.

Later accounts offer sharply different explanations. Michael Thompson recalls rumors that the plane crashed after the war and was intended to be dismantled and removed. In that version, American soldiers had taken Germany’s last gold reserve and planned to fly it across the Atlantic; another rumor substituted looted European art for the gold. Sarah Steinkamp rejects the postwar timing: she says the aircraft belonged to the Nazis and crashed before the war ended, as they tried to escape. Jón likewise remembers a plane flying low over his family’s house shortly before peace was declared, then vanishing into the darkness. These accounts agree on neither the aircraft’s precise mission nor the story told about its cargo. Their contradictions make the war’s end a contested history rather than a single, securely transmitted fact.

The search and the price of secrecy

The crash leads to an American search expedition in 1945. Colonel Miller takes charge of the rim of the nose wheel found on the ice, while the brothers discover it roughly two kilometres farther onto the ice cap. Beyond that fragment the surface appears smooth, with no visible sign of a forced landing or wreck. The brothers suggest that drifting snow may already have covered the aircraft. The image of the glacier swallowing the evidence gives the wartime episode its enduring physical consequence: the plane can be absent from sight while still shaping what people fear and investigate.

Jón later recalls what Miller told him and his brother: the aircraft carried dangerous biological weapons, a virus developed by the Germans, and had to be found urgently. That explanation differs from the gold and art rumors and from the surviving diary’s account of the crates. Jón says the brothers did not question the request for help. Miller searched with such intensity that they admired him and became personally close to him, but repeated severe storms ultimately forced the expedition to stop. In the second storm, tents and equipment were buried and lost. The search thus begins as an urgent wartime effort but ends without recovering the aircraft or establishing what it carried.

A past no participant fully possesses

The novel makes the limits of wartime knowledge part of the mystery. Decades later, Miller explains that only a tightly controlled number of people in the army knew about Operation Napoleon. He himself never knew exactly what it involved or what the documents contained; he had heard only fragments and considered himself an errand boy assigned a particular problem. His brother, too, was a pawn rather than a decision-maker. Miller believes a small group of American generals in Europe conceived the operation and entered into talks with the Germans as the Red Army advanced into Eastern Europe. He links those discussions to proposals about an armistice with Germany and a possible campaign against Russia, while stressing that he does not know who initiated the plan. He recalls General Patton as the only person to advocate such an idea openly, and says others were tired of war and wanted peace.

That confession does not close the historical gap; it defines it. The diary preserves a participant’s unanswered questions, Jón preserves Miller’s explanation of the biological threat, and Sarah insists on a pre-surrender crash while Thompson repeats a story of postwar theft. The war is therefore present not only in the aircraft’s origin but in the unequal distribution of knowledge among its witnesses. Its unfinished secret survives through an ice-buried plane, damaged papers bearing the words Operation Napoleon, and recollections that can be sincere without being complete.