A man who foiled the Nazi nuclear plan dies at 99

OSLO (Reuters) – The leader of a bold raid aimed at thwarting the nuclear ambitions of Nazi Germany during the Second World War was killed at 99, government officials said Sunday.

Joachim Roenneberg, who served behind enemy lines in his homeland, Norway, during the German occupation, exploded in 1943 a plant producing heavy water, or D2O, a substance rich in hydrogen that was the key to the further development of atomic bombs.

Chosen by British wartime special operations commander for the raid when he was only 23, Roenneberg was the youngest member of Operation Gunnerside, who had penetrated and destroyed key elements of the hydroelectric power plant. Norsk, highly guarded.

Subject of books and documentaries as well as movies and television series, the attack took place without a single shot.

For the Roenneberg team, however, the stakes could not have been greater. A previous raid had not even reached the site, with dozens of attackers being captured and killed, and Gunnerside members later described their own assault as a suicide-like mission.

Parachuting on a snowy mountain plateau, the small group teamed up with a handful of other commandos before skiing to their destination, walking into the factory and blowing up the production line. heavy water.

Describing a crucial moment, Roenneberg then announced that he had made the decision to reduce the life of his fuse from a few minutes to a few seconds, so that the explosion would occur, but what about it? be more difficult to escape.

While a manhunt ensued, the group fled hundreds of kilometers across the mountains. Roenneberg joined neighboring Sweden two weeks later.

While historians doubt that Germany's Adolf Hitler could have produced a nuclear weapon in time to avoid a defeat, they also recognize that the risks were much more difficult to quantify in 1943.

For Gunnerside's crew, that mattered little at the time; It was only much later that they learned the true purpose of the attack that they had been asked to lead.

Born in 1919 in the city of Aalesund, Roenneberg fled to Britain after the German invasion of Norway in 1940, where he received military training before returning home to perform several missions during the war.

After the liberation of 1945, he became a journalist on the radio, but rarely spoke of his achievements in war. Later in his life, he gave speeches and lectures until the nineties, warning against the destructive force of totalitarianism.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg paid tribute to Roenneberg for his work during and after the war.

"He is one of our great heroes," she told the NTB news agency.