After handing his soldiers suicide pods, Norwegian Army Colonel Leif Tronstad said, “I can’t tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will be remembered by Norwegians for at least a hundred years.”
A Operation Gunnerside He turned 80 in February and is not only remembered by Norwegians. According to Professor Timothy J. Jorgensen, radiation expert at the University of Georgetown, USA, the sabotage mission from a German chemical plant in Telemark, in Nazioccupied Norway, is considered one of the most dramatic and important military episodes of World War II. Without telemark production, it was impossible to build an atomic bomb.
In order to reach the factory, which was located on a remote mountain, in the middle of the Norwegian winter, they parachuted in the military. Then they used skis to move faster through the snow. The factory was surrounded by a ravine and the only access to the facility was via a bridge, which was heavily patrolled by the Nazis. To escape the Germans, the Norwegians descended to the bottom of the gorge, crossed the frozen river and climbed the slope over 200 meters.
In a 2018 article published in the online magazine The Conversation, Timothy J. Jorgensen says that the actions of the Norwegian military delayed Germany’s nuclear program by months and gave the United States an important advantage in the race to develop the first nuclear bomb. If the Germans had managed to create nuclear weapons, the outcome of the war could have been very different.
Adolf Hitler was more interested in developing a longrange ballistic missile than the atomic bomb during World War II. Photo: Associated Press
Joachim Ronneberg, the leader of the group that planted explosives at the German factory, said years later in an interview looking back on the incident: “A lot was just luck and opportunity.” There was no plan. We just hoped for the best.” However, he continued, if the mission had failed, London “would have ended up like Hiroshima”.
Although Operation Gunnerside was by far the most cinematic, experts agree that it was not solely responsible for the Germans’ crucial delay in making the atomic bomb. The mass exodus of scientists early in the war, the lack of suitable laboratories and investments, and the weak numbers of German scientists themselves would also have contributed to the failure of the Nazis, who even took the lead in the race for nuclear weapons, but later they lagged behind.
After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, physicists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner warned the US government of the danger to humanity if the Nazis were the first to develop an atomic bomb.
The warning was pivotal in the US government’s decision to launch the Manhattan Project, an initiative jointly developed with Canada and the United Kingdom, in 1942. Theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer was commissioned to found and direct the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was successfully tested in 1945. The story is told in the film Oppenheimerby Christopher Nolan, which premieres in Brazil this Thursday 20th.
Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from the film Oppenheimer. Photo Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP
Before the war began, the world’s leading theoretical physicists were German. However, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany and also of fascism in Italy, many of them decided to emigrate, including Nobel Prize winners Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi. Many eventually went to the United States and worked on the Manhattan Project.
Even the financial support was not up to the challenge. According to historians, Adolf Hitler was more interested in developing the V2, a longrange ballistic missile. Germany would have invested around one million US dollars in the development of the atomic bomb, while the US would have spent more than two billion US dollars.
German research was carried out in ordinary university laboratories, without the need to set up a special laboratory or factory. The Manhattan project involved no less than 250,000 people working on the most diverse fronts, while the German project would have involved about a hundred people.
Finally, a story almost as cinematic as the Norwegian military’s operation in the middle of the snowcapped mountains is that the German scientists themselves would have sabotaged the project had they not agreed to it. The coordinator of the German nuclear project himself, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, himself a Nobel laureate, even claimed several times that scientists were morally opposed to the atomic bomb.
“The relationship between the scientists and the German state was such that we were not 100 percent intent on building it (the atomic bomb), but on the other hand we did not have the trust of the state,” explained Heisenberg shortly after the end of the war. “Even if we had wanted to, it would not have been easy to carry out the project.”