Forbidden History - Hitler's Polar Railway

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we hear the remarkable story of one of the northernmost railway lines on earth - high in the northern reaches of Scandinavia, this line links the coast of the Norwegian Sea with the rich resources of inland Sweden. But its secret story remains hidden at the bottom of a nearby fjord where the wrecks of Nazi destroyers and Allied ships lay testament to the crucial role it played in WWII… Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://surfshark.com/forbiddenhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠ or use code FORBIDDENHISTORY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Cast List: Tim Dunn: Railway Historian Guy Walters: Author & Historian Claire Barratt: Industrial Engineer Frank Bang: Underwater Photographer Steingrim Sneve: Local Guide Nigel Jones: Author & Historian Eystein Markusson: Narvik Battle Expert Dominic Selwood: Historian & Journalist Stig Olav Johansen: Local Historian Prof. Steinar Aas: WWII Historian Rasmus Norling: Kiruna New Town Curator Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. A railway line in the middle of nowhere that changed the course of World War II. This is seriously insane. Hitler was mad in many ways, and this is just another way in which he was crazy. A bloody battle to control its precious cargo.

vast cantilever bridge was built to be blown up. And a town on the move. There is a real threat of collapse. With this mega mine underneath the town, it's not your usual place to live. The station and the entire town around it are having to be moved. This is the fascinating story of the Karuna to Narvik railway line. Out in the fjords of northern Norway lies a railway line built across some of the harshest terrain on earth.

This line is built in one of their most remote parts of the world. It's almost 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Several months a year, it's light or it's dark. It's really, in many ways, not the most pleasant place to live. These are icy wasteland. Only people who've been there really before the railway prospect has turned. up with the Sami people, and that was just their way of life. To build this railway and then work in these conditions,

that took people of a real certain type. This railway line, high in the Arctic Circle, in the northern reaches of Scandinavia, straddles both Sweden and Norway, linking the coast of the Norwegian Sea with the rich resources of inland Sweden. It sprung up out of nowhere at the turn of the 20th century and now serves two thriving towns

two thriving towns, Narvik and Karuna. Karuna is one of the oddest places you can imagine. Compasses don't work there, but yet the local people seem really quite comfortable with it all and take it all into their stride. And beneath the town, a secret megacity sprawls underground. This extraordinary place gave birth to a remarkable railway line. This railway line is quite fascinating from the point of locomotives. They're pulling 100 tonnes, 68 wagons. That's a huge, huge amount.

If you really want to understand why this railway line is so important, you've got to go off the railway tracks and look and find what's the bottom of the Narvik Fjord and what is beneath the waves. Today we think of Narvik as being this somewhat obscure port in the north of Norway. That's indeed if anybody's heard of it. but actually sunk there are scores of battleships, destroyers, U-boats, all of which are testament to the absolute strategic vitality of that port. It's an incredibly eerie and poignant sight.

The wrecks date back to World War II. But what happened here in the quiet waters around Narvik? What were they fighting for? Norwegian underwater photographer Frank Bang explores these sunken tombs. The 9th of April, 1940, in the early morning, 10 destroyers came into Norway. There were tons of ships waiting to get to the port. It was snowing that day, so they couldn't see anything. They were hearing some noise outside when the German destroyers sent some

torpedoes and tend most of the witchen boat down to the death. It's like a graveyard. The reason for this lethal attack lies in the ground at the other end of the railway line. It's one of the raw materials that changed the world, iron ore. The mineral had been discovered in Karuna in the 17th century, although its remote location prevented it from being mined. But with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, 100 years later, the world was crying out for it.

Engineers were going to have to find a way to exploit the ore. And this called for building works on a massive scale. They had to think about how they were going to get it out. How were they going to transport it worldwide? So the railway is the first step. But actually, it was not just a single. transportation, it's about processing your, providing support for the workers, where

were they going to live, what were they going to do? The whole system, they're created from nothing. The iron ore mines, the railway and the harbour together are actually one giant mega system. They're one piece of infrastructure. They are one and the same. In addition to the railway line and the towns of Karuna and Narvik, the mega system also included a power station and a port in Sweden. All of these were needed to mine the vast amounts of iron ore. But the Swedish harbor was icebound for several months of the year, whereas Narvik, thanks to the Gulf stream, never freezes. That meant that everything depended on the Karuna to Narvik railway line. Construction began in 1898.

Norwegian guide, Steingrim Sneve, has expert knowledge about the workers who made it happen. There were 5,000 of them working here in the mountain, and they were very difficult conditions. There's a lot of high mountains, and when they started to make the line, they have to be hang in rope down the mountain side to try to drill out stone. stone. One of the techniques at the time was to insert explosives in a hole in the rock face. It was an efficient method but extremely dangerous. And the difficult terrain was only part of the challenge. For half of the year, workers had to contend with the freezing weather during Arctic winters

that were icy, snow-covered and brutally cold. You could wake up one morning and there is a two or three meters snow on the place you used to work. So you have to use more or less the whole day removing snow before you could start with work again. It's really, really hard. They made a line in four years. That is fantastic. And remember, this was the first time they have built a railway so far north in the... in the world.

The line was opened in 1903, and it was originally serviced by steam engines. But soon, electric trains were introduced. The extreme weather conditions at this latitude demanded special machines. One of these was a rotating snowplow which was fitted to the front of the train. But if the weather was one obstacle, there was another more human threat on the mind of the railway engineers. At the time of construction, the enemy of the Norwegian people are actually the Russians. At the beginning of the 20th century, Finland was part of the Russian Empire. And building a railway line across Sweden and Norway exposed both countries to a potential threat. In peacetime, you hope

for the best. But in the back of everybody's mind was the fact that this railway line could be used in a time of war. And they needed a get-out. clause. The military decided that this is a very important line and they want to protect it against enemies from East. They said that if you build a line, you have to have one point to break the line. The solution was to build a bridge with an explosive secret. The Nordale Bridge is eerie and it's just clinging in there in the valley.

But it's beautiful as well. It looks from a distance incredibly spindly. It's made up of lots of tiny different elements. But don't be fooled, it's incredibly strong. At 130 feet high and 590 feet long, the bridge had to carry the heavily loaded iron ore trains while serving a darker purpose. The Nordale Bridge goes over a bit of water which isn't even necessary. They could have bypassed it by a very, very simple.

curve. It sounds crazy, but it was a purpose-built Achilles heel in the railways construction. The bridge took a year to build, an incredible effort for a structure that wasn't even needed in the first place. Not many people now today looking at it realize that this great, big bridge, this vast counter-liver bridge, was built to be blown up. The challenge was how to construct the bridge so that it could be destroyed at will. Engineers don't normally think about how to demolish their things. That's someone else's job. But to actually go for it, you'd have to blow up the foundations.

If you destroyed individual pieces, well, that's all relatively easy to put back together. You'd have to go for the foundations. And that's exactly what they did. When they build this huge bridge, they make mine chambers to put explosive in, one meters and 40 deep. At the same time, they build a stockhouse for explosive on the end of the bridge. Everything was geared for an attack from the east. But in the end, the threat would actually come from the west.

Decades after the bridge was built, the region would face the might of the Fermacht. During the 1930s, Germany built a mighty fighting force of planes, tanks, and ships, and trained an army of one and a half million men as it prepared for war. It also imported 22 million tons of iron ore per year, 45% of which was from Karuna. But why was this mineral so crucial to the Nazi cause? Iron ore is a vital part of the manufacturing process for munitions, armaments, you name it. Without it, Hitler's war machine is almost crippled.

Iron is the main component of steel, and steel makes tanks, battleships and shells. But after war broke out, Germany found itself cut off from its usual sources of iron ore. This railway line is an absolutely vital part of Hitler's war plan. Why? Because he needs the iron ore from Karuna in Sweden to be shipped along the railway line to Narvik, the Norwegian port. From there, it can be taken to the heart of the Third Reich. It's an absolutely strategically vital part of Hitler's war plan. Hitler knew, as Britain knew, that if the supplies of iron ore were choked off,

German industry could only last for months. And so Norway became vitally important to Hitler. He had to seize it in order to ensure that the warm materials of Germany kept functioning, that the wheels of the factories kept turning. Hitler ordered the Kriegs Marine to attack the ports of Norway, and Narvik was top of the list. It was a surprise attack. They arrived in the middle of the night.

The Norwegians weren't expecting them. They attacked by destroyers transporting troops by sea. Ten German destroyers came in here a little before 5 in the morning on 9th of April, 1940. There were two Norwegian Navy ships sitting in the harbor, the Aizol and the Norgia. They were both sunk instantly. They were torpedoed by the Germans, and 282 sailors died. It didn't take long at all for the Nazis to sink those ships and take the port of Narvik.

But any triumph was to be short-lived. By firing those first shots, they had set in motion two main. major naval battles. Five British warships descended on Narvik. The battles that followed on April 10th and April 13th, 1940, saw some of the most bitter fighting of the war so far. Meanwhile, a group of Norwegian soldiers boarded a train. Their mission? To blow up the railway line's weakest link. The Nordell Bridge. Norwegian saboteurs attempted to destroy the bridge. Conditions were so unfavourable that the damage they managed to do to it was minimal.

What was meant to be straightforward explode the Nordell Bridge that had been built to be blown up in the first place turned out to be a fiasco. For one thing, there was not enough dynamite in the on-site reserves. And that was just the beginning of the problems. This mining chamber they put the explosive in, what they should do, but the mining chamber was filled with ice. They didn't succeed. Blowing up the Nordell Bridge may have been a failure.

But back in Norfolk, the naval battle was in full flow. The railway line was badly damaged, and many ships were sunk during the fighting. Today, poignant reminders of the battle still can. capture the scene. Hidden beneath the surface are the haunting wrecks of more than 40 sunken ships. These wrecks are still there in the waters and the fields of northern Norway, still waiting to be explored. Shipwrecks are like gold for historians. They tell you so much. This is history buried underneath that fjord.

So for historian to look under the water and see what's there, there. It's almost like a birthday and Christmas at the same time. In 2011, Frank Bang found what was perhaps Norvick's most precious underwater secret, a Nazi bronze eagle. This had to go to a museum if you're still there, because there are treasure hunters all over the world. And he sells on the black market for thousands and millions of crowns. So me and my friends, we did two days of searching. The second day we found it.

The eagle belonged to the destroyer Erik Giza, which was sunk on the 13th of April, the final day of the battle. On that day, the four remaining German destroyers ran out of fuel and ran aground in the nearby Rambax Fjord. The surviving German officers escaped the rail. and ran up to the railway line in the hope of securing it. It was a victory for the Allies, at least at sea. British forces had landed at Narvik and fought a long battle

along with their French and Norwegian allies to try and hang on to that vital port. On the Swedish side, a secret weapon was being deployed on the train tracks. In May 1940, in the mines workshops, construction was completed on two enormous armored trains, the Karuna and the Bodin. They were made from iron ore carts which were covered with armor plates and fitted with anti-aircraft machine guns. These were huge destructive machines. Only a few days after construction was completed, the Karuna was in action a few miles outside

Narvik exchanging fire with German aircraft. Now the tables had turned, and the Germans had lost the advantage. It was their turn to try and sabotage the railway route by bringing down the power lines. The fighting around Narvik continued until June 1940. The Battle of Narvik was something of a draw. Although the Allies won and managed to repulse the German forces, the Allies then had to withdraw to use their ships for Dunkirk, so left the area for the Germans to retake.

So ultimately, it was a German victory. But at what cost? In the long-term history of the war, it probably made the invasion of Britain impossible because 50% of the German destroyers were destroyed in the Norway campaign by the Royal Navy. But for now, the Germans were able to savor their victory. They repaired the damage to the railway line, and it seemed nothing could stop them. The failure by the British only leaves Hitler much stronger. It now means he's got access to all that iron ore.

He controls the railway line. But this wasn't enough for Hitler. He was ambitious. He was confident. And he wanted more. And so, he greenlit a scheme to take the railway line to another level. Today, traces of that project can be seen from a highway south of Narvik. Stig Olaf Johansen knows these well.

When I was a load driver, I discovered tunnels near the road that led to nothing. And I thought that was mysterious and started my only investigation. What Stig discovered was not written in the history books. He found a railway line with a very grim past. We continue the story after the break. Hitler had a, on paper, a very logical idea to build a railway line that would link Narvik all the way to the south of Norway, and therefore would enable him to easily transport all this iron ore near to Germany.

Hitler's vision was to build a railway line that would stretch from Oslo to the border with Russia, just 1,400 miles south of the North Pole. That would allow the Germans to move iron ore and troops wherever and whenever they wanted. The new line would be called the Polar Bonin, or simply the Polar Line. It's very difficult building railway lines in a country like Norway, but Hitler was very ambitious, crazily ambitious, and wanted to build a 2,000-kilometer railway line in just two years. This is seriously insane.

Hitler was mad in many ways, and this was just another way in which he was crazy. Hitler was planning to use the existing railway lines wherever possible, but there was still a long section that had to be constructed. A large number of fjords had to be crossed, and many tunnels had to be built. It seemed an impossible project, and from day one, there were problems. Hitler entrusted the building of the Polar Bannon to the TOT organization, which was a military and civilian engineering conglomerate, that built many of the pieces of infrastructure in the Third Reich.

And to do the actual building, they employed prisoners of war, slave labor in effect. In total, 30,000 Soviet prisoners of war worked on the Polar Bonin project. Slave labor he uses takes a long time to get there, and when it gets there, it doesn't have the expertise, the materials, or indeed the time needed, to produce what would be one of the most incredible engineering feats in railway history. People today don't realise they drive to that landscape without actually driving past a chunk of history.

You can still see lots of dotted about parts of the civil engineering. Just some tunnels, some tracks, a few buildings, vestiges really. It's a ghostly reminder of what once was and what could have been. A short walk from the highway, people can still find the remains of the polar line. One of the stones weighs over 200 kilos. How did they get a stone there by lifting? Many prisoners of war lifted it in place. The conditions in which the poor people who worked on that railway line,

the forced labourers, the prisoners of war, slaves essentially, were absolutely dreaded. careful. Five hundred workers slaved away under the watch of armed guards. Many of them froze to death during the Arctic winter, but the cold was not the only danger. They drilled here and put dynamites in here and blasted. It was very dangerous because sometimes they didn't get all the stones to fell down. And they went inside the tunnel and suddenly a block came down and killed one of the workers. Many people got killed.

Tragically, it is estimated that the number of prisoners who died working on the polar line was as many as 15,000. But this line was not the only grand project Hitler had in mind for this part of the world. An abandoned fortress 32 miles west of the polar bonnan is there to prove it. World War II expert Steiner Oz tells us more. Hitler actually was very obsessed by this idea that Norway was the zone of destiny. So it was very dramatically speaking. And he had this idea that the northern flanks of his occupied region was easy to invade.

Fortifications were built up the coasts to cover the defense lines and block the way into the fjords, which would give out. access to the railway inland. These coastal artillery batteries were part of the Atlantic Wall, the defense system built by the Germans to protect the occupied territories that stretched all the way from Spain to the tip of Norway. It was possibly the greatest single construction project

undertaken during the 20th century. See that topography of Norway and the geography of Norway is quite different than Denmark and France. You can't cover all the coasts. coast because there are fjords, there are rugged coastlines, and there are islands all over the place. Hitler had spent all sorts of money and energy in fortifying a country that never needed to be fortified. There were approximately 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war in Norway. They were ruthlessly exploited by the Nazis to build more than 200 bunkers along the coast to form part of the Atlantic Wall.

But using them for the construction of the polar line was not as successful. Hitler's mad ambition had come up against reality. The terrible Arctic conditions, along with a workforce with no expertise and no allegiance to the Reich, meant progress was extremely slow. This railway was never completed, only about 30 to 40 kilometers of the line was ever constructed, and it didn't ever see out the Second World War. The polar line may have been a failure, but it arguably played an important role in the outcome of the war. Hitler was so obsessed with Norway that he kept an extraordinary large number of troops, whole divisions there throughout the war,

who were uselessly occupied in just sitting there when they were desperately needed, for example, on the Eastern Front. It became an absolute idé fixe for Hitler. He wanted to hang on to it at any cost, even when there were no Allied plans, to invade it. In 1945, there were still 400,000 German troops in Norway as a result of Hitler's direct orders. It was an army that could have been deployed elsewhere, an army that could have changed the course of history.

Once the war ended, the railway line continued to carry iron ore, and it went from strength to strength. Ironically, it was during a time of peace that the Nordle Bridge eventually met its end. One of the reasons the bridge been taking out of service is because it can't cope with the size of the trains today. Today's trains on the Karuna line are actually some of the biggest electric power trains in the world. They are pulling huge, huge loads. 68 wagons, 100 tonnes over quite steep gradients. That's a lot of power in that loco.

When they were first introduced, electric trains on the line were only able to pull 1,900 tons. Tons. Incredibly, today the capacity is 6,800 tons. Every day, 10 trains run from Karuna to Narvik, each filled with enough iron ore to manufacture 70,000 cars. They are able to travel through rough, difficult mountain terrain in all weather's. But luckily, the last leg of the journey is downhill. Cleverly, they use the braking system to recharge the batteries, and they get so much power from that. Once they've unloaded the ore, they can take that train back up under that saved power. Thanks to this, the trains can use the thousands of kilowatts per hour they produce

to travel all the way back to the Swedish border. This megatrain has allowed the mine to go into overdrive. What started as a hole in the ground is now one of the most sophisticated mines anywhere in the world. They've gone from open-cast mining and removing the top of the mountain to going over a kilometre underneath. And underneath there is a whole world in itself. It's a huge, huge city, but underground. The mining operation at Karuna is absolutely vast.

There are something like 400 kilometers of roads and routes underneath. And they're even trained inside that mine. The technological mega-system may have been a grand project at the turn of the 20th century, but its engineers would have been hard pushed to guess just how big and high-tech the mine would be today. Mining here never stops. They extract 75,000 tons of iron ore every single day of the year. year. That's roughly the amount needed to build a 12-story building. I find the scale of this mine, absolutely mind-boggling, and the mine is king. There is no doubt

about that. The town is people's homes and people's lives, but the mine is the reason they are there. And to be dominated by that one huge industry is incredible. But the town is paying a high price for the success of the mine and its railway line. Iron ore may have made Karuna a lot of money, but also it's ultimately destroying the town. The Swedes have excavated so much iron ore that now the town is literally sinking. In 1898, when they set out to build Karuna, they wanted to make the perfect town. They thought about the civic planning, the direction of the streets and the architecture and the extra buildings that people would need, the churches, the shops,

And they put it in place. And for over 100 years, it worked. Who could predict that the mine would get so huge? It's spread out underneath the town, and now what was a safe place to be is actually being literally undermined. Already, huge swaths of land have collapsed, and the inhabited areas are now in danger.

Dotted around on the roads and the buildings, there are various monitoring devices. and even just marks, measuring how far things are cracking and what's moving. Quite an eerie place to live. This dramatic situation has also affected the railway line. The entire history of the train line has never been dull, but now one of the most extraordinary things in its life is happening, which is that the station and the entire town around it

are having to be moved three kilometres to the east. Such is the extent of the colouring. as the extent of the collapse of the mine underneath, that it's no longer stable at ground level. The railway station, built well over a century ago, once at the heart of the town, is now a pile of rubble. Due to it being so close to the mine, unfortunately, it was one of the first buildings to have to go. What I find extraordinary is that Karuna is his weird place, and the people there are very kind of laid back and blase about what's happening to their town. You know, they've got cracks on the walls, their houses are falling down,

yet they just kind of shrug their shoulders and think that somehow it'll be okay. The historic station has been replaced by a temporary one, built in a safer location. Eventually, there will be a new town centre two miles down the road. As humans, we get attached to our environment. and the people of Karuna are no different. So although the town is collapsing, we can't save all the buildings and the masonry ones never going to move.

But things made up timber, they can be moved. The construction team are literally moving the town's houses and iconic buildings down the road. It's not the ideal solution, nobody wants to move. But being able to take those focal buildings and rebuild your town around them, it's fantastic for the human spirit. It's an event.

Every time a house roll, there are people standing on the way to follow it while it moves to its new location. It's not every day that you see your house rolled by on the street, so of course it's a big thing. For the past 100 years, the Karuna to Narvik trains have brought over 1 billion tons of iron ore to the world. But success came alongside some of the world.

dark times, proof of which lies in the rubble of Karuna, in the remains of the Nordal Bridge, in the graveyards of the polar line, and in the sunken wrecks of Narviks' fjords. However, it is now reborn, and the Arctic Railway Line is as strong as ever. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.

And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places, available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.