A4 8x12 inch typed written letter signed by Norwegian Resistance and SOE member Claus Helberg (1919-2003). Helberg took part in the ‘Vemork’ raid which had a film made about it called The Heroes of Telemark
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From his obituary
The Norwegian resistance hero Claus Helberg, who has died aged 84, took part in one of the most daring and important commando raids of the second world war - the attack on a heavy-water plant crucial to the Nazis' nuclear plans. Nine British-trained Norwegian saboteurs were dropped by parachute on a frozen lake in the county of Telemark, west of Oslo, on February 17 1943, to attack the Norsk-Hydro laboratories at Vemork, near Rjukan, Helberg's birthplace.
Their exploits were immortalised in The Heroes Of Telemark (1965), starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris.
Helberg's local knowledge was crucial to the raid's success. The third of five sons of an intellectual family, he had taken a job as a guide and skiing instructor after finishing college in Bergen. He was captured during the Nazi invasion of Norway, but escaped and, after training in England, returned home for the Telemark attack.
Operation Freshman, an earlier raid on the heavy-water facility, had failed in November 1942, when the two gliders carrying British Royal Engineers and their Norwegian escorts crashed miles away from the objective. The 14 survivors were rounded up by the Germans and shot the same day.
The destruction of the plant was requested by General Leslie Groves, the American military administrator of the Manhattan project, then developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Prompted by warnings from Albert Einstein, the allies feared that the Nazis might build a nuclear device before them. Indeed, had the Germans not dismissed particle physics as "Jewish science", and forced its practitioners out of the country in the 1930s, this could well have happened.
Heavy water, a compound of oxygen and a rare isotope of hydrogen, is found in microscopic quantities in ordinary water, from which it can be slowly and expensively extracted by distillation and electrolysis. Its function in the harnessing of atomic energy for use in nuclear reactors (before the discovery of uranium enrichment) was to slow down the chain reaction which, when unrestrained, produces a nuclear explosion.
The Nazis were interested in both applications, but Hitler neither understood nuclear physics nor tolerated research that took more than a year to produce results.
Werner Heisenberg, the discoverer of the "uncertainty principle" in particle physics, and leader of the German wartime nuclear programme, later claimed that he had proposed the nuclear reactor application while opposing the bomb, though his true attitude remains as uncertain as his theory. It is more likely that he regarded the bomb as unachievable, rather than undesirable, even though nuclear fission had been a German discovery.
Hitler's armaments minister, Albert Speer, agreed. He did offer Heisenberg bomb research facilities in 1942, but the Germans concentrated what nuclear work they did on the reactor application. In the same year, the number of scientists involved in nuclear research was cut from 70 to 44. Their annual budget peaked at little more than 3m Reichsmarks in 1944.
The allies, of course, had no knowledge of German scientific doubts or Nazi indifference. They did, however, have reliable information that the Germans were working on a reactor, and they knew too that reactor science and bomb science were intimately connected. It was also clear that the Nazis had acquired Belgian uranium from the Congo, and had the Norwegian heavy-water plant at their disposal.
Helberg and his colleagues in Operation Gunnerside wore white snowsuits over their British uniforms as they landed 30 miles northwest of Vemork, in the midst of the toughest mountain country in northern Europe. They had weapons, skis, a radio, 18 packs of explosive - and poison capsules in case they were caught.
After struggling through terrible snowstorms for 11 days, the group reached a mountain top overlooking the remote site, descended into a gorge and climbed up the other side to attack on February 28. They penetrated the plant through a cable conduit, and detonated a series of explosions that spilt half a ton of the painstakingly collected heavy water. No one was injured in the raid; five commandos got away to neutral Sweden, and four spent five months eluding capture before escaping to Britain by sea.
A German general described the Telemark operation as the finest coup he had ever heard of. It delayed the research by a year. Yet the Germans soon had the plant going again, and work was only brought to a halt by a heavy raid of American bombers. It took another Norwegian operation - sinking a ferry carrying heavy water to Germany in 1944 - to bring the Nazi nuclear programme to a permanent halt.
After the war, Helberg, now famous throughout Scandinavia, went back to his outdoor life, helping to open up mountain trails and shelters for hikers and climbers. He is survived by Ragnhild, his wife of 53 years.
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