Hamburg

Hamburg is the setting of a postwar intelligence operation recalled by Benedicte Clahn, whose work there in 1946 brings a secret expedition to Greenland into the novel’s history. In the British-occupied city, Danish women censored letters and deciphered a coded correspondence known as Operation Niflheim; their discovery established a route from apparently ordinary messages to a planned voyage, though not its purpose.

Setting and wartime work

After initially declining to discuss her wartime work, Benedicte corrects the suggestion that she had worked in Berlin: it was Hamburg. The city belonged to the British occupation zone, and a special train carried her group there. They were housed in Count Goltz Barracks in Rahlstedt, in a former Hitler Youth barracks, and worked in a large hall. The women lived in double rooms and held the rank of sergeants in the British Army. At each work table, a British captain served as table monitor.

Benedicte describes a large Danish contingent: six hundred women were working in Hamburg alone. They opened incoming and outgoing mail, read it, stamped it censored, and sealed it again. Photographs and drawings were removed, while letters mentioning former Nazis in positions of authority during Germany’s reconstruction could be reported. The work placed her among the routines of occupation administration, but its central assignment was more secretive: identifying communications associated with Edelweiss, a German underground organization.

The search for Edelweiss

The Allies needed information after German forces had burned much of their own archives during retreat. In the letters, references to Edelweiss could be indirect: a mention of the name, a pressed flower, or even underlining that might spell it. The censors marked such clues with their individual rubber stamps and passed the letters to the table monitor. Ordinary surveillance thus became a search for a hidden organization, conducted through small marks and coded references embedded in private correspondence.

The investigation narrowed in August 1946, when the letters changed character. Many came from the same correspondents, and a German censor who had worked for von Gehlen joined the group. Benedicte gradually recognized that the work concerned a specific case: her colleagues asked her about repeated phrases, and one recurring word was Niflheim. She looked it up and understood it as a reference to a world of mists and the realm of the dead. By the end of August, the team was receiving correspondence exchanged by the same four people. They knew the writers’ names, but never saw the envelopes or learned their addresses.

Deciphering Operation Niflheim

The coded letters appeared to concern the transport and sale of goods. Their code was both hastily learned and difficult to break because it relied not on ordinary language but on a series of agreed metaphors. Johannes Loyen joined the group as a medical consultant. He was in Germany as a forensic medicine expert involved in the closure of concentration camps, and his knowledge of German allowed him to contribute on equal terms with the other investigators. Benedicte recalls that the group had little need for medical consultation, but Loyen became part of the deciphering effort.

The breakthrough came at the end of September. One letter gave a forecast of the price of beans during the current week: figures rose slightly each day and reached their peak on Friday. Benedicte compared the pattern with an almanac her mother had sent and recognized that the numbers resembled tide tables. Checking British fleet almanacs revealed the ebb and flow of the Elbe. The team then deciphered the preceding letters, a process that took three weeks. Their reconstruction concerned finding a ship and sailing it to Greenland. The operation was called Niflheim.

What the account leaves unresolved

The letters also concerned negotiating for a ship under emergency conditions, the possibility of sailing to Kiel and then north through Danish waters, which passages had been cleared of mines, and the British blockade of the Elbe and the Kiel Canal. The correspondence was careful not to state openly what the writers were trying to accomplish. Although the deciphering established the planned voyage and its route, Benedicte never discovered what the expedition was for; she did not think the other members of her group knew either.

Hamburg’s significance therefore rests on both what its censors uncovered and what remained beyond their knowledge. The city’s mail rooms expose a concealed connection between Allied intelligence work and an expedition to Greenland, while the secret at the heart of that connection stays unresolved in Benedicte’s testimony. Her recollection supplies the operation’s name, methods, personnel, and proposed passage, but not its ultimate purpose.