by Neal Bascomb
There were scores of Germans in the waterside town, but it was beyond the restricted zone and Helberg felt he would be safe there. The boat for Oslo left the following morning, so he checked in to the Dalen Hotel, an architectural confection in wood: carved dragonheads, rounded balconies, and elaborate turrets. After an early dinner of fried trout, seasoned carrots, and thick bread spread with strawberry jelly, he retired, well sated, to his second-floor room. He hid his pistol on the outside windowsill and crawled gingerly into bed, his arm and shoulder throbbing.
Shortly after he fell asleep, he was awakened by the sound of pounding on doors, heavy footsteps down the hallway, and commands barked in German. SS soldiers emptied every room and sent the occupants to the lobby. The sleepy guests were informed that Reichskommissar Terboven, accompanied by his security chief, Heinrich Fehlis, was taking control of the hotel for their temporary headquarters. With soldiers surrounding the hotel and guarding every entrance, Helberg knew there was no escape. He presented his false papers, lied again about his injury, and was one of the few who were allowed to return to their rooms instead of staying in the lobby all night. Once there, he dared not leave.
While Helberg rested uneasily in his room, the Reichskommissar and his high officials sat down at two long tables by the fire. They ordered dinner and some bottles of wine. The conversation was about how they should reposition security forces throughout Norway to better defend the country from an Allied invasion.
Upon learning that among those who had been turned out of their rooms as a result of his arrival were two young attractive Norwegian women, Terboven invited them to join their table. One of them, Aase Hassel, spoke fluent German and won Terboven’s unwelcome attentions. Later in the wine-soaked evening, Terboven asked Hassel about her family. She told him that her father was a Norwegian Army officer. Then he must be happy, Terboven said, to be safe and part of the compulsory workforce recently instituted by the Germans. “No,” Hassel said. “He’s in Britain and I’m proud of it.”
Everyone at the table went stock still. Seething from her remark, Terboven turned his attention to her friend. Before long he started in again, criticizing university students who mistakenly thought themselves “patriots.”
Hassel could not resist. “All good Norwegians are patriots.”
Again the table went still. Again Terboven kept silent. He would deal with her later.
At 10:30 a.m. the next morning, his arm in a sling, Helberg slowly descended the stairs from his room, a soldier trailing behind him. The Gestapo was sending all but a few of the hotel’s guests to Grini in return for some “bad behavior” shown to Terboven the night before. Once at the camp, Helberg knew he would no longer be able to talk himself clear. His identification papers would be double-checked and determined false. Then the interrogations would begin—if he did not swallow his cyanide capsule first.
The soldier behind him kicked him in the back for not moving fast enough. He pitched down the steps, and his Colt sailed out of his belt and clattered to the floor. It came to a halt between the black boots of another soldier. Helberg could barely believe his bad luck. The soldier picked up the gun. “As you can see, it’s not loaded,” Helberg said in his pidgin German, as he struggled to his feet. He was sure that he was as good as dead now.
A ruckus followed, several soldiers speaking quickly to each other about what to do. Since Terboven and his entourage had already left, there was nobody there to countermand the order to bring Helberg to Grini.
Let the officers at the prison camp sort it out, they decided. Helberg was pushed into the line of prisoners filing out of the hotel to a rickety bus with blacked-out windows. He was one of the last to climb onboard, and found a spot on the floor at the back of the bus. A single SS soldier in a steel helmet, armed with a rifle and grenades, watched over them from the front.
The bus rolled out of Dalen for the 140-mile ride to Oslo, escorted in front and behind by SS riding in motorcycles with sidecars. Helberg was resolved to escape, somewhere along the way, somehow.
The afternoon passed in silence, the bus straining to get through the mountains, its occupants shivering from the cold. Two young women were in the seat beside Helberg. One of them scolded him for putting all their lives at risk by trying to sneak a pistol onto the bus. Hungry, and a little eager to tease her, Helberg took her notebook, tore off some pieces of paper, and ate them. Her response was to give him a throat lozenge to help him swallow. She introduced herself as Aase Hassel and spoke proudly of her father and uncle who were in Britain.
In the middle of their conversation, the guard came down the aisle. “You sit there,” he said to Helberg, pointing to the front of the bus. Helberg shuffled down toward the driver. If the guard wanted to flirt with the young women, then fine—it would give him his chance. He sat down by the door and eyed the pull handle that operated it. From the passing landmarks, they must be thirty miles from Oslo. With some luck, he could reach the woods. The bus started up a hill and slowed down to a crawl. Helberg rose, grabbed the handle, pulled, and jumped.
He tumbled onto the road, slamming into his broken arm. The guard inside the bus started screaming for the driver to stop. Before he could obey, Helberg was already scrambling through the snow-covered field toward the woods. He fell several times, each time certain that the Germans were about to reach him.
The field ended in a thick, tall hedge that stopped him in his tracks. He couldn’t get past it. “Stop!” a German guard yelled.
Helberg knew what he had to do. He was sure to get shot, but he saw no other choice. He turned around and barreled back across the field toward the soldier on the road. A grenade exploded in the snow behind him. Unhurt, he continued. Several gunshots sounded. Nothing hit him. Not that he could feel, anyway. He dashed across the road between the bus and a motorcycle, zigzagging to avoid being tackled by the German soldiers, momentarily confused by his head-on approach. Then he ran across the field on the other side of the road. Another grenade exploded behind him, too far away to cause harm. Then something hit him in the back, hard: a third grenade. He would never get clear of it.
The explosion never came. The grenade was a dud.
He sprinted headlong into the woods and darkness. There were several more gunshots, but the Germans had to be aiming blindly. Helberg slowed to recover his breath, then threaded through the trees, his arm ablaze in sheer agony. A soft rain was falling, but he knew that his tracks would still be evident in the snow come morning. Finally, after a long hike through the forest, he came upon a long rectangular building lit up from inside. He climbed over the barbed-wire fence surrounding it and staggered to the front door.
An old man answered his knock. Helberg was out of lies. His arm was shattered. He was bloodied and dazed. His clothes were in tatters. He surely could not go any further this night. If this man was a good Norwegian, he would help. If not, Helberg was lost. The man welcomed Helberg in and told him he had arrived at a psychiatric hospital. They had food, doctors, clothing, and beds. Helberg was safe.
At 9:00 a.m. sharp on April 8, Heinrich Fehlis stood at the steps of the Hotel Dalen in front of four battalions. After sixteen days combing the Vidda, his men needed to be relieved. They were all exhausted. Some suffered frostbite on their hands and feet; some had broken bones; all were weather-beaten, their faces blistered. They were in terrible shape. They had trekked hundreds of miles through the mountains and the surrounds of Lake Møs. They had struggled through storms to penetrate the plateau, searching cabins as they went. One of their number had been shot by a Norwegian during a chase from Lake Skrykken.
Fehlis had visited their quarters in the days before, making sure that they had cognac and vermouth to put in their hot drinks. Now he thanked them for their effort. “Every day, you boys have endured long marches and still you assemble in high spirits, without complaint. Among my troops, you have distinguished yourselves.” Then he discharged them. Other battalions would take their place.
To date, there was l
ittle to show for the action. Some stores of explosives and weapons had been found, and the huts in which they had been hidden had been torched. There had been some arrests—one of a wireless operator—but nothing of note and certainly none of the Vemork saboteurs. If his manhunt failed to make progress soon in finding those responsible—his intelligence reports indicated they were likely members of the so-called Norwegian Independent Company No. 1—then Fehlis would have to call off the search.
High in the Hamrefjell mountains, Skinnarland and Haugland settled down for their second night in a cave they had dug out of the snow. The southwest wind howled outside the narrow opening, and the cold burrowed down into their bones like a sickness. Having spent nearly a month in hiding since the German razzia began, they were used to such conditions.
They had been staying at Nilsbu when, on March 24, Jon Hamaren hurried up from his farm to warn them that a raid was underway. Skinnarland’s brother Olav had been one of the first arrested, Hamaren told them, and the soldiers who had taken Olav away now occupied his hotel by the dam, where his wife, Ingeleiv, was forced to wait on them at all hours while also tending to her young son and newborn daughter.
Skinnarland and Haugland had cleared Nilsbu of weapons, radio equipment, and other gear, and buried the stash away from the cabin. Then they skied and hiked up the narrow gorges and steep cliffs of Hamrefjell to a spot over five thousand feet up. There they stayed, for ten days and nights, with only a tent, a kerosene stove, and their sleeping bags to keep warm. Through binoculars, they watched the German patrols moving about Lake Møs and the surrounding hills. On occasion a Storch search plane shot overhead. Though exposed on the mountainside, they knew it was unlikely they would be found. If anyone approached their tent they would see them from a long way off. Given the precipitous terrain, their pursuers would struggle even to reach their position. Best of all, the Norwegians who had been conscripted as local guides included Hamaren and other local farmers, and they knew to keep the Germans away from their hiding spot.
On April 1, when the Nazis’ search had moved away from Lake Møs, Skinnarland and Haugland returned to Nilsbu. Although the Germans set up a mobile D/F station down by the lake to sniff out any transmissions, they positioned it in such a low-lying place that it was unable to pick up the Nilsbu signal. Haugland continued to train Skinnarland as a radio operator, and he was sufficiently adept to send his first message to Home Station a week later, describing the razzia, the lack of news from Haukelid, Kjelstrup, or Helberg, and the pressing need for a drop of supplies. Tronstad answered with the news that Poulsson had made it to Sweden along with Rønneberg, Strømsheim, Idland, Kayser, and Storhaug. Those members of the team were safe at least.
On April 16, Hamaren had warned Skinnarland and Haugland about renewed enemy activity around the lake. The two fled back up into the Hamrefjell mountains at speed and built their snow cave. The next day, Skinnarland went down to Nilsbu to investigate and discovered two sets of skis leaning against the cabin wall. Fearing they belonged to Germans, he retreated back into the mountains to stay again burrowed in the snow.
The following morning, no sign of any patrols down below, he and Haugland skied back down to Nilsbu. As they edged their way carefully to the cabin, they sighted the trespassers: It was Haukelid and Kjelstrup. They enjoyed a warm and happy reunion, and the four men shared the stories of their narrow escapes with each other. They also discussed the cruel waste of herds of reindeer destroyed by German machine guns while the razzia was underway. Later that day, the farmer Hamaren came to the cabin to tell them that Claus Helberg had been shot and killed while trying to flee a German patrol. There was little hope the report was false. They forwarded the news to London and mourned the loss of their friend.
The time had come to launch their resistance work. Skinnarland was transmitting at a fast-enough clip to run his own wireless station. Haugland was headed for Notodden, then on to Oslo, to start a network of radio operators for Milorg. Haukelid and Kjelstrup would build up the resistance cells in the district. For all four men, their original mission had been accomplished. As far as they knew, they would have nothing more to do with Vemork.
22
A National Sport
* * *
IN MID-APRIL 1943, a military truck drove across the suspension bridge into Vemork. Secured in the truck bed was what looked like a steel drum of ordinary potash lye, an ingredient in the electrolysis process. What the drum actually contained was 116 kilograms of almost pure heavy water from Berlin. It had been originally produced at Vemork.
Soon after the sabotage on February 28, a stream of Norsk Hydro company men and German officials had come to the plant to decide its fate. Some argued that all the salvageable equipment be shipped to Germany, since destroying the plant had virtually become a “national Norwegian sport.” Others, including Bjarne Eriksen, the Norsk Hydro director general, wanted to start up again at Vemork. Esau and the Army Ordnance Office were asked for a “swift decision,” which they delivered: the cells should be repaired and the plant expanded as soon as possible. Heavy water facilities at Såheim and Notodden should also be completed. The German command provided any materials and manpower required (including slave labor from abroad) and warned that if the work was not completed quickly enough, there would be severe reprisals.
By the time the secret shipment of heavy water from Berlin arrived at Vemork, the round-the-clock work on the plant was almost complete. The shipment was used to fill the new high-concentration cells, overriding the slow process of accumulating the precious substance drop by drop, and accelerating the return to production by several months. With three new stages and a number of cells added to the preliminary electrolysis process as well, the Germans projected that daily output would soon reach 9.75 kilograms. Given the plans to double the size of the high-concentration plant yet again, the daily yield might reach almost 20 kilograms within the year.
While this was going on, SS officer Muggenthaler and Lieutenant Wirtz, the new head of guard at Vemork, finalized the security measures. Another guard was placed at the suspension bridge and two more at the railway gate. Others patrolled the grounds with Alsatian dogs night and day. Sappers laid more mines on every approach. Barbed-wire fences were raised. To defend against an air attack, additional wires were strung across the valley, and fog-producing machines were placed about the area. The pipelines were camouflaged, and torpedo nets were set up to protect the Lake Møs dam. A permanent guard was posted outside the rebuilt high-concentration plant. All the doors but one, which was reinforced with steel, were bricked up or sealed with wooden planks. The windows were similarly blocked off or fixed with iron bars and wire mesh. Within the plant, a team of guards was armed with submachine guns.
Muggenthaler weeded out any employees perceived to be a threat, and German technicians took on roles within the facility to spy on any illicit activity. Vemork may have been a fortress before, but now its high-concentration plant was a fortress within a fortress. And on April 17, 1943, at 2:00 p.m., heavy water began to flow securely through the cascade of cells.
Three weeks later, on May 7, the Uranium Club met at the Reich Physical and Technical Institute in Berlin. The scientists were under pressure for results like never before. With German fortunes in the war deteriorating, the Allies set to retake all of North Africa, and the Soviets continuing to defeat the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, the Nazi brass felt a desperate desire for something that would quickly turn the tide in their favor. One report stated that “rumors abound in the general German population about a new-fangled bomb. Twelve such bombs, designed on the principle of demolishing atoms, are supposedly enough to destroy a city of millions.” Worse yet, Abwehr intelligence had revealed that the Americans were on the path to creating “uranium bombs.” The German atomic program was riven by factions, and its scientists and research centers now exposed to attack by Allied bombing. They needed a breakthrough to focus their efforts.
The first item on the agenda for the May 7 mee
ting was heavy water. Only the previous day, at a German Academy of Aeronautical Research conference, Abraham Esau had placed part of the blame for their slow atomic progress on the recent lack of heavy water. He wanted to press ahead with production in Germany, the plans for which had long been stalled because of the cheap supply from Norway. Paul Harteck advised that after a few more experiments, the Leuna pilot plant, using his catalytic exchange process, could likely be expanded to produce five tons a year, if they fed it with slightly enriched water from Vemork or a couple of Italian electrolysis plants. He also suggested that they try another method, invented by Klaus Clusius, which capitalized on the slightly higher boiling point of heavy water to produce enriched amounts. Esau gave the go-ahead on the preliminary work for Leuna and charged Harteck with determining whether the Clusius method made sense on an industrial scale. But with Vemork back online, and these additional projects, Esau felt confident they would soon have all the heavy water they needed.
Diebner was less sure there was enough to go around. He made it clear that he needed every drop for his next two experiments. His team’s most recent uranium machine (G-II), which used uranium metal cubes suspended in frozen heavy water, showed neutron production at a level one and a half times greater than any German experiment so far. The machine proved that a cube design was far superior to any other in fostering a chain reaction, he said, and at the right size, it would likely be self-sustaining.
