The Grand Escape

by Neal Bascomb

  Together, they woke up their young children, Sidsel and Leif, and helped them dress and pack. Fifteen minutes later, they piled into their car. As they headed south over a river bridge, two ash-colored bombers flew overhead.

  “What kind of plane is that?” Sidsel asked.

  “It is a German plane,” Tronstad said, his first explanation of their hurried departure. “I’m afraid the war’s come to our country.”

  German police troops march into Oslo in May 1940.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Knut Haukelid chose a different path out of Trondheim. He and a few NTH students took control of a freight train in the city and drove it almost halfway to Oslo, until they found the tracks closed. They abandoned the train and took a bus to the nearest Army headquarters. There, they learned the heartbreaking news that the Nazis had taken Oslo, and King Haakon VII and the Norwegian government had fled the capital.

  In fighting to free his country, Haukelid found his purpose. He tracked down a regiment battling the Germans and received a Krag rifle and thirty rounds of ammunition. At first glance, Haukelid probably looked similar to all the other soldiers the commander was sending into war, with nothing particularly notable about him. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and a medium build that hunched slightly at the shoulders, and at five foot ten, he was just above average height.

  Yet over the next three weeks, despite having no military experience, Haukelid fought ferociously for his country and king, refusing to surrender as their invaders demanded. His battalion ambushed a line of German tanks at a mountain pass, wiping them out with homemade bombs and a single cannon, but apart from that one success, they were pushed back again and again. The German Blitzkrieg, with its armored vehicles, fast bombers, and well-trained troops, were simply too overwhelming a force to resist.

  His regiment surrendered, but Haukelid did not. He tried to reach the fighting in the two strategic valleys that ran between Oslo and Trondheim, but his countrymen were already in retreat. Finally, he traveled into the capital and went to his parents’ home, a spacious apartment in the city center. His father was away, so only his mother was there to welcome him. Haukelid went into the room where he still kept a few possessions and closed the door. “What are you doing?” his mother asked.

  Knut Haukelid.

  “Getting some things,” Haukelid said, grabbing his cross-country skis and boots from the closet.

  “You need to get out and fight,” she told him.

  That was exactly his plan.

  Before the war came, Knut Haukelid was a bit of a lost soul. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Norwegian immigrants, but his family returned to Oslo when he and his twin sister, Sigrid, were only toddlers. Dyslexic and restless, he hated school. Sitting still in those hard chairs all day, listening to the drone of teachers, was torture for him. Talking in class only turned the screws, thanks to a slight stutter. He entertained himself by pulling pranks. Once, he released a snake in the middle of class, earning one of his many suspensions.

  The lone place Haukelid was able to run free was the family’s country lodge. On weekends and in summertime, he skied, fished, camped, and hunted with his grandfather in the mountains and lakes of Telemark, west of Oslo. Haukelid was told the old tales of trolls inhabiting and protecting the lands of Norway, and he believed them. His faith in these creatures lent even more magic to the woods he loved.

  After high school, Haukelid left for the United States to attend college. He traveled the country, working at farms for spare cash. A few years later, he came back to Norway. His father found him a well-paid job at Oslo’s biggest bank, but Haukelid turned it down. He could earn more money, he told his father, fishing for trout — and off he went. After several months of fishing, he moved again, this time to Berlin. (His sister, Sigrid, left the country as well; she went to Hollywood and became a movie star known as the “siren of the fjords.”) Haukelid studied engineering, learned German, and questioned his future. In 1936, he saw Hitler’s propaganda parade at the Olympics. One night, when he ran into a drunk Nazi Party member who was spouting one nasty statement after another, he dropped him with a punch.

  At last, he returned again to Oslo, and finally gave in to his father’s wish for him to get serious with his career and his life. He took a job with his father’s firm, importing engineering equipment from the United States, and he fell in love with a young woman named Bodil, a physical therapist who treated him for some back pain from all his outdoor adventures. Still, Haukelid was restless, not quite at peace with himself, until he found his purpose in defending his country.

  Despite the heroic efforts of many Norwegians like Haukelid, by early June 1940, Hitler controlled the entire country. King Haakon and the government fled to England by ship, and the nation’s top general pleaded to his former soldiers, “Remain true and prepared” for the future fight.

  Haukelid got straight to it. In Oslo, he and a friend who had received wireless training in Britain launched their own spy network for the Allies. For months, the two moved from hut to hut in the woods outside Oslo, sending radio signals to Allied forces but hearing nothing in return. Through a range of contacts in the city, they collected intelligence on the German command in the capital — everyone from Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, who served as Hitler’s right hand in Norway, to General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who oversaw the German military forces, to SS Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich Fehlis, who ran the security services. Unable to make contact with British or Norwegian allies in London, they continued their efforts nevertheless, and even hatched a plot to kidnap Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist whose political party served as a puppet government for Terboven. Haukelid and his friend were daring and brave; they were also amateurish and terribly ineffective. But they had joined a growing resistance movement that hoped to drive the Nazis from their land. They all felt they had to do something.

  Reichskommissar Terboven moved quickly to consolidate Nazi rule. He removed any Norwegians not loyal to the “New Order” from positions of influence: judges, clergy, journalists, business heads, policemen, mayors, and teachers alike. The Norwegian parliament was closed permanently, its members sent home. The main government buildings in the heart of Oslo flew Nazi flags.

  SS Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich Fehlis and Reichskommissar Josef Terboven.

  The Nazis’ presence extended well beyond Oslo. Travel after curfew or beyond a certain place without an identity card or pass was made illegal. Radios were banned. Anyone breaking the rules was subject to arrest — or whatever punishment the Nazis chose, since it was the Nazis, not the police, who enforced the law. Nothing was published in Norway without the censor’s stamp of approval. New schoolbooks were printed to teach students that Hitler was Norway’s savior. Strict rationing of coal, gas, food, milk, and clothing left families scraping by. People found themselves making shoes from fish skins and clothes from old newspaper. All the while, the Germans took whatever they wanted for themselves, from the finest cuts of meat to the best houses.

  Nazi flags hang in the central Oslo train station.

  Some Norwegians supported the new German order. Many others merely did what they were told. But there were others still who pushed back against the Nazis. In September 1941, workers throughout Oslo went on strike against the strict rationing of milk. Terboven put martial law into effect. Hundreds were arrested, and the security chief, Fehlis, ordered the execution of the two strike leaders. Following this, the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, intensified their hunt for underground resistance cells.

  Soon they came for Haukelid, storming his family’s apartment. He was not home, but the Gestapo arrested his mother, Sigrid, and his new wife, Bodil. When asked where her son was, Sigrid slapped the Gestapo officer in the face and said, “He’s in the mountains.”

  “No,” the Nazi said. “He’s in England. Our contact tells us he’s already been taken across the North Sea. And what do you think he is doing there?”

  “You will find out when he comes back!” she promi
sed.

  Leif Tronstad would not stand for the Nazis living in his country and lording power over its people. Their presence was a violation of everything he held dear, and their occupation robbed him of the life he’d built from nothing.

  Three months before Tronstad was born, his father died of a heart attack. His mother supported her four sons by serving as a maid at private dinner parties hosted by the wealthier families in their neighborhood outside Oslo. Growing up, Leif was either studying, running, or working. He excelled at all three activities, setting new track records and making the highest marks at school. His favorite subject was always science. He simply liked to understand how the world worked. He graduated college with top honors, married his childhood sweetheart, Bassa, and won scholarships to focus on chemistry at some of the best institutes in the world, including Cambridge University in England and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin.

  Talented not just in the lab but also in theoretical work, Tronstad found many opportunities open to him. Since his first student days, he had wondered whether he should work in industry or teach. In the end, he told Bassa that, while he wanted to be a professor, he would leave the decision to her. “If you like, I can make as much money as you want,” he said. She gave him her blessing to teach. He was soon a professor at NTH. He bought a nice house a ten-minute walk from the university and a car to drive out to his mountain cabin, where he, Bassa, and their two children skied and hiked. During these prewar years, Tronstad also worked as a consultant to several Norwegian companies, advising them on the manufacture of steel, rubber, nitrogen, aluminum, and other industrial products.

  After his government surrendered to the Germans, Tronstad returned to Trondheim with his family. He kept his job, but NTH was now under German control. Professors who pledged their allegiance to the Nazis quickly gained power within the university, not to mention board seats on many of the companies where Tronstad consulted. The Nazis intended to use every sector of Norwegian industry to supply its war machine.

  Tronstad wanted nothing to do with such efforts. Instead, like Haukelid, he became deeply involved in the underground — the homegrown military resistance called Milorg. Through his rich trove of contacts (and by maintaining some of his consulting jobs), he helped supply industrial intelligence to the British. With most of Europe quickly falling under German rule, and the United States not yet in the war, free Britain was the lone beacon of hope for those who wanted to fight the Germans.

  Leif Tronstad.

  In early September 1941, as the Gestapo was breaking up resistance networks across Norway, Tronstad decided to inform the British of a very disturbing development at a place called Vemork. What was happening there could well give the Nazis the power to win the war.

  Water ran plentifully throughout the high wilderness plateau of the Hardangervidda, or the Vidda, in Telemark, a region in Norway west of Oslo. It tumbled down from the plateau into its natural reservoir at Lake Møs, and then the Måna River carried the water for eighteen miles through the steep Vestfjord Valley to Lake Tinnsjø.

  The river’s flow changed when Norsk Hydro, a rising industrial giant, built a dam at the top of Lake Møs in 1906. They redirected the water through tunnels blasted out of the rock, which ran for three miles underground before they reached the Vemork power station. From there, the water fell 920 vertical feet through eleven steel pipelines into turbine generators that produced 145,000 kilowatts of electricity. It was the world’s largest hydroelectric power station.

  The dam at Lake Møs.

  A fraction of this water was directed into a hydrogen plant thirty feet away on the edge of the cliff. There it flowed into tens of thousands of steel electrolysis cells, which consumed almost all the power generated at the station. The cells created currents of electricity that split the water’s two hydrogen atoms from its lone oxygen one. These separated gases were then pumped through a long series of pipes down to Rjukan, a town of 7,000 people at the bottom of the valley. Chemical plants in the town used the hydrogen to make fertilizers — a huge product for agriculturally oriented Norway.

  The water, which had by now coursed from the Vidda to Lake Møs through tunnels, then pipelines, then electrolysis cells, was not done yet. A smaller fraction of it was sent through yet more cells and pipelines, reduced and further reduced, until it turned into a steady drip no quicker than a leaky faucet. This water was now something unique and rare. It was heavy water.

  The American chemist Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of heavy water in 1931. While most hydrogen atoms consisted of a single electron orbiting a single proton in the atom’s nucleus, Urey showed that there was a variant (or “isotope”) of hydrogen that carried a neutron in its nucleus as well. The sum of an atom’s protons and neutrons is called its atomic weight, so this isotope, deuterium (D), had a weight of 2. It was extremely rare in nature, where there was just one molecule of heavy water (D2O) for every 41 million molecules of ordinary water (H2O).

  The hydroelectric power station at Vemork.

  Building on Urey’s work, several scientists found that the best method for producing heavy water was electrolysis. The substance didn’t break down as easily as ordinary water when an electric current ran through it, so any water remaining in a cell after the hydrogen gas was removed was more highly concentrated with heavy water.

  As an isotope of the element hydrogen, the deuterium atom includes a neutron (in white) as well as a proton (gray) and electron (on the outer ring).

  But producing deuterium in any quantity demanded enormous resources. A scientist noted that in order to create a single kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heavy water, “50 tons of ordinary water had to be treated for one year, consuming 320,000 kilowatt hours [of electricity], and, then, the output had a purity no better than about ten percent.” That was a lot of electricity for a very low level of purity in a very small quantity of deuterium.

  A man named Jomar Brun ran the Norsk Hydro hydrogen plant at Vemork; he also happened to be a former college classmate of Leif Tronstad. In 1933, Tronstad and Brun proposed the idea of a heavy-water industrial facility to Norsk Hydro. They weren’t sure what use it would have, but as Tronstad frequently said to his students, “Technology first, then industry and applications!”

  Jomar Brun in his office at Norsk Hydro.

  What Tronstad and Brun did know was that Vemork, with its almost limitless supply of cheap power and water, provided the perfect setup for heavy-water manufacturing. They matched the plant’s natural advantages with an ingenious new design for the equipment. Think of a group of cans stacked in a pyramid. Now picture that pyramid upside down, with the single can at the bottom. In the Tronstad-Brun design, water flowed into the top row of cans — really 1,824 electrolysis cells, which treated the water with a current. Some of the water was decomposed into bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen gas by electrolysis, and the remainder, now containing a higher percentage of heavy water, cascaded down to the next row of cans in the pyramid (570 cells). Then it repeated the process through the third (228 cells), fourth (twenty cells), and fifth (three cells) rows of electrolysis cells. However, by the end of the fifth stage, with a huge amount of time and power exhausted, the cells still contained only 10 percent heavy water.

  The high-concentration stage at Vemork in its 1942 configuration.

  Then the water cascaded into the bottom can of the pyramid. This sixth and final phase was called the high-concentration stage. Set in the cavernous, brightly lit basement of the hydrogen plant, it actually consisted of seven unique steel electrolysis cells lined up in a row, surrounded by twisting snakes of pipework, blue tubes, and electrical wires. These specialized cells followed a similar cascade model to concentrate the heavy water in each cell. But they could also recycle the gaseous form of deuterium back into the production process, while it was essentially wasted in the other stages. As a result, the heavy-water concentration rose on average 11.5 percent from one cell to the next. By the seventh and last cell, the
Vidda’s natural flow had been purified to 99.5 percent heavy water.

  When the plant started production with this method, scientists around the world praised it as a breakthrough. Heavy water froze at 4 degrees Celsius instead of at zero, and some joked it was only good for creating better skating rinks. Tronstad, however, believed in the potential of heavy water. He spoke passionately of its use in the new field of atomic physics, which was a hotbed of scientific activity, and of its promise in a range of fields. Researchers found that the life processes of mice slowed down when they drank small amounts of heavy water. Seeds germinated more slowly in a diluted solution — and not at all in a pure one. Some people believed that heavy water could lead to a cure for cancer.

  Vemork shipped its first containers of heavy water in January 1935, in batches of 10 to 100 grams, but business did not boom. Laboratories in France, England, Germany, the United States, Scandinavia, and Japan ordered no more than a few hundred grams at a time. In 1936, Vemork produced only 40 kilograms for sale. Two years later, the amount had increased to 80 kilograms, a sum valued at $40,000; but that meant nothing to Norsk Hydro, which raked in tens of millions of kroner per year. The company advertised its heavy water in industry magazines, to no result: There simply wasn’t any demand. Production was shut down on Tronstad and Brun’s creation, and dust started to gather on the seven cells in the high-concentration room.

  Then, just months later, everything changed.

  Heavy water from Norsk Hydro.