Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 13:31:20 +0200 (CEST) From: Steffen Thorsen <straen@thorsen.priv.no>
I have not been able to find if Jan Mayen used a different time zone (e.g. -0100) before 1930. Jan Mayen has only been "inhabitated" since 1921 by Norwegian meteorologists and maybe used the same time as Norway ever since 1921...
Thanks for your research; it prompted me to do a bit more on my own. It appears that Jan Mayen was never occupied by Germany during World War II, so it must have diverged from Oslo time during the war, as Olso was keeping Berlin time. <http://home.no.net/janmayen/history.htm> says that the meteorologists burned down their station in 1940 and left the island, but returned in 1941 with a small Norwegian garrison and continued operations despite frequent air ttacks from Germans. In 1943 the Americans established a radiolocating station on the island, called "Atlantic City". Possibly the UTC offset changed during the war, but I think it highly unlikely that Jan Mayen used German daylight-saving rules. Svalbard is more complicated, as it was raided in August 1941 by an Allied party that evacuated the civilian population to England (says <http://www.bartleby.com/65/sv/Svalbard.html>). The Svalbard FAQ <http://www.svalbard.com/SvalbardFAQ.html> says that the Germans were expelled on 1942-05-14. However, small parties of Germans did return, and according to the book Wilhelm Dege's book "War North of 80" (1954) <http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/publishing/rights/dege_warnorthof80.htm> the German armed forces at the Svalbard weather station code-named Haudegen did not surrender to the Allies until September 1945! All these events predate our cutoff date of 1970, so, unless we can come up with more definitive info about the timekeeping during the chaotic war years I'm inclined to put "Link Europe/Oslo Atlantic/Jan_Mayen" into the tz database.