1946

1946 is a pivotal postwar date in the novel’s account of Operation Niflheim, the secret plan to find a ship and sail it to Greenland. The year also belongs to a wider history of Danish authority over Greenland: the recollections surrounding it connect wartime intelligence, the administration of the postwar order, and the erosion of Greenlandic language and cultural autonomy.

The 1946 intelligence work

In March 1946, a young Danish-Swiss woman joined a group recruited by the Royal Air Force at Dagmar House in Copenhagen. The RAF was seeking young people who could speak German and English. She had studied in Grindelwald, spoke both languages, and was too young to have joined the Resistance during the occupation. She presented the recruitment as a chance to serve Denmark, though she also admitted that she wanted to follow a boyfriend who had gone to the post.

The group initially deciphered two letters a day, often love letters. In August, the correspondence changed: the same four people appeared repeatedly, and a new censor, Holtzer, joined the group. He had worked for von Gehlen and knew more about the case than the young woman first understood. Johannes Loyen, then in Germany as a forensic medicine expert involved in closing concentration camps, later joined as a medical consultant and became a full participant in the codebreaking.

Operation Niflheim

The word that drew the group’s attention was Niflheim, which the woman looked up as the world of mists and the outermost realm of the dead. The letters concealed their subject behind metaphors ostensibly about transporting and selling goods. The group never saw the envelopes; it knew the correspondents only by name, not by address. The code was improvised and comparatively careless, but difficult because it relied on an agreed system of metaphors rather than ordinary language.

At the end of September, the woman made the decisive breakthrough. A letter described the weekly price of beans rising day by day and reaching its highest point on Friday. She connected the pattern to the week’s full moon, then recognized that the figures resembled tide tables. Comparing them with British fleet almanacs revealed that they represented the ebb and flow of the Elbe. The group spent three weeks working backward through the letters. They discovered that the correspondence concerned finding a ship and sailing it to Greenland: Operation Niflheim.

The recovered messages discussed negotiating for a ship during the state of emergency, sailing to Kiel and north through Danish waters, and identifying passages cleared of mines. They also referred to the British blockade of the Elbe and the Kiel Canal. The purpose of the Greenland voyage remained unknown to the woman; she believed the other members of the group may not have known it either. The plan’s operational details could be reconstructed, but its ultimate motive stayed beyond the reach of the evidence she recalled.

Memory and the larger history

The account is presented as a recollection decades later, when the woman recounts the codebreaking to Smilla and the mechanic. Its retrospective form preserves both what the work established and what it failed to explain: the route and ship were legible in the correspondence, while the reason for the expedition was not. The episode therefore makes deciphering an act of recovery with a limit, rather than a guarantee that every secret can be resolved.

The novel places this postwar episode beside the structures that continued to shape Greenlandic life. Smilla recalls that, when she was seven, children in Copenhagen were gathered at Rugmarken’s School to learn Danish. Later, after the move from village school to Qaanaaq, teachers who did not speak Greenlandic presented Danish education as the route to opportunity and a way out of Arctic hardship. Greenland’s official classification as Denmark’s northernmost county and the political designation of Inuit as Northern Danes made assimilation sound like equal treatment, even as it displaced the language through which children remembered their past.

Smilla compares that deterioration to safety carabiners tested on Disko Island: after three months exposed to sea fog, equipment advertised as able to withstand a 9,000-pound load could be pulled apart with a fingernail. Language, she observes, can also be weakened through exposure. In this larger frame, 1946 is not simply a date in an intelligence story. It marks a postwar moment in a history where state power, secrecy, and Greenland’s place in Danish political order intersect, while personal memory preserves what official categories and administrative narratives leave unresolved.