The Nazi Outpost In Canada That No One Noticed

At this point, if someone told you that Hitler once had a plan to breed spy bobcats to infiltrate American homes that owned regular cats, your reaction would probably be "Yeah, that does sound like one of those weird secret lost Nazi plots." People have been finding crazy stuff that Nazi Germany left behind for years now, and while none of it has been as cartoonish as the aforementioned Operation Fuhrer Panthers, some of the real ones are almost as unbelievable. For example, there's the secret plot to infiltrate CANADA that North Americans didn't find out about for almost half a century.

When you think of recent wars on Canadian soil, most of them usually involve slightly rough handshakes after escalated "Which is better, Tim Horton's or Swiss Chalet?" debates. But during World War II, in an attempt to better follow weather patterns from the Western Hemisphere, the Germans sent a U-boat to Newfoundland, constructed a weather station, and marked that it belonged to the Canadian Weather Service. And it WORKED. That's literally a half step more effort than "NOT NAZI WEATHER STATION. PLEASE IGNORE, MEINE FREUNDE."

No one figured out the truth about the station for nearly 40 years, when Franz Selinger discovered it while writing a book about Nazi weather stations. (Though it would've been VERY embarrassing if the guy literally writing the book on Nazi weather stations didn't find it.) The station was uncovered in 1981, finally providing people with evidence of the only armed landing that the Nazis ever made in North America.

This ain't the only story of Nazis in Canada. Check out Cargo of Lies: The True Story of a Nazi Double Agent in Canada for another good read.

Support Cracked's journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out Hollywood Arose From Thomas Edison's Defeat and Creepy Fact: Orangutans Can Use 'Hitmen'.

Also, follow us on Facebook. Or don't, it's your life.