Greenland's been in the political news lately, and while reading about
its history I found an unsourced statement in Wikipedia[1] that
Greenland observed daylight saving time during World War II. I found a
few published sources confirming this, but none with enough details for
me to figure out what changes should go into tzdata.
For now I installed the attached proposed patch which merely adds
commentary. If someone could find the details we could fix the data
accordingly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_in_World_War_II
From 55f2268b2247a53fcb73de39fad49c4763a911e8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:46:43 -0800
Subject: [PROPOSED] Greenland observed DST in WWII
Unfortuanately we lack details, so for now just add a comment.
* europe: Add comment re WWII Greenland.
---
europe | 12 +++++++++++-
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/europe b/europe
index af521710..8159bfb1 100644
--- a/europe
+++ b/europe
@@ -1041,9 +1041,19 @@ Zone Atlantic/Faroe -0:27:04 - LMT 1908 Jan 11 # Tórshavn
# Greenland
#
-# From Paul Eggert (2004-10-31):
+# From Paul Eggert (2026-01-22):
+# During World War II, Greenland was effectively independent of Denmark and
+# observed daylight saving time. TIME, volume 37, page 23 (1941-04-21)
+# <https://time.com/archive/6770243/war-peace-greenlands-icy-mountains/> says,
+# "Penfield and West made their way to the U.S.'s most northerly consulate.
+# They were astonished to find that Greenlanders, with almost 24 hours of
+# sunlight a day during the summer, have daylight saving time."
+# As the details are unknown they are omitted from the data for now.
+#
# During World War II, Germany maintained secret manned weather stations in
# East Greenland and Franz Josef Land, but we don't know their time zones.
+# Also, they're likely out of scope for the database
+# as we lack resources to track every bit of military activity.
# My source for this is Wilhelm Dege's book mentioned under Svalbard.
#
# From Paul Eggert (2017-12-10):
--
2.52.0
