Knowledge of past climate change is essential to test our understanding of the rapidly changing Arctic. One of the longest Arctic temperature time series comes from observations in Svalbard that extend back more than 125 years but have a gap during World War II between 1941 and 1945. Observations from German military weather stations on Svalbard have now been retrieved from weather maps preserved at the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), which will help close much of the existing data gap.

From 22 to 23 September 2023, a conference of the History of Polar Research Working Group of the German Society for Polar Research took place at the 'Hugo Junkers' Museum of Technology in Dessau to mark the 100th anniversary of the Junkers aid expedition to Svalbard. The contents of the conference are summarised in this report. Additionally, the contents are reviewed on the basis of modern polar literature and a plea is made for greater interdisciplinarity in polar science.