Knut Haukelid – Norwegian Allied Spy (1917- )
Twin brother of actress Sigrid Gurie, Knut Haukelid was a leader of the Norwegian underground during World War II. He, more than any other, was responsible for preventing the Germans from producing and shipping heavy water (deuterium oxide) in their race to develop the atomic bomb. Knut was born May 18, 1917 in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was an engineer working on the New York City subway system. The Haukelid family returned to Oslo in 1918.
Norsk Hydro, Norway’s hydroelectric authority, had established in the mountainous valley near Rjukan, in West Telemark, a plant dedicated to producing heavy water. When the British SIS informed Prime Minister Winston Churchill of this in 1942, he called his cabinet together. An immediate decision was made to send thirty specially trained engineer troops to Rjukan to destroy the plant. This was an SOE operation, (Special Operations Executive).
The men were sent in gliders but the mission proved to be a total failure. The glider mission disaster called for new action. In England, SOE which coordinated underground efforts in Nazi-occupied Europe, located some Norwegian refugees who volunteered for espionage and sabotage missions in their country, chiefly covert operations against the Norsk Hydro plant. Members of the Norwegian underground were smuggled back into Norway, one of these being Knut Haukelid a daring, adventurous young man who was a born leader. SOE built a replica of the plant and had their Norwegian agents familiarize themselves with every nook and cranny of the place, in preparation to blowing it up.
Knut Haukelid led a team of Norwegian agents by parachute into Norway in early 1943. The agents crossed the hazardous mountain passes on skis, then slipped into the plant, overpowering the guards and planting an explosive which damaged the plant and caused heavy water production to be shut down for several months.
By 1944, with Hitler screaming for new super weapons, German scientists resolved to speed up development of the atomic bomb by removing the entire Norwegian heavy water plant to Germany. To that end, all the heavy water produced to date was placed in large drums. These drums would be placed on the ferry that would carry them across Lake Tinnsjo to a waiting train that would carry them to the sea and then, by ship, to Germany.
Learning of this, Haukelid and his men got aboard the ferry the night before the Germans arrived, planting an explosive which was timed to go off just as the ferry reached the point of the lake where its waters were deepest. The bomb went off exactly as planned and sank with the drums of heavy water in the deepest part of Lake Tinnsjo, thus disabling the German scientists from completing their atomic bomb development. His story and that of other heroic Norwegian resistance fighters was told in the film The Heroes of Telemark.
McNair Paper Number 41, Radical Responses to Radical Regimes: Evaluating Preemptive Counter-Proliferation, May 1995
Preventing NAZI A-Bombs
At the inception of World War II, leading physicists on all sides were cognizant of the possible revolution in explosive power that might be extracted from a uranium bomb. However, each side was faced with a huge investment and scientific challenge before theoretical knowledge could be converted into an operational atomic weapon.
American and British nuclear physicists felt they started their A-bomb projects considerably behind their German counterparts and feared Hitler’s forces would be the first to have use of atomic arms. This evaluation was based on a number of considerations: (Note 23)
The high caliber of German theoretical and experimental physicists like Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, Werner Heisenberg (Note 24), Fritz Strassman, and Carl-Friedrich Von Weizsacker;
- German control of Europe’s only uranium mine after the conquest of Czechoslovakia;
- German capture of the world’s largest supply of imported uranium with the fall of Belgium;
- German possession of Europe’s only cyclotron with the fall of France;
- German control of the world’s only commercial source of heavy water after its occupation of Norway.
Attacks on German nuclear installations from 1941 until the end of 1943 were not effective in doing more than harassing the German nuclear research effort. A key target was the German-controlled heavy water production plant, Norsk-Hydro, at Vemork, Norway. (Note 25) Heavy water was required to conduct nuclear fissionexperiments and denial of the Norwegian plant’s output would cripple the German atomic bomb research effort.
British intelligence recommended destruction of Nosrk-Hydro at the earliest possible date. British paratroopers failed in their first raid in late 1942 when their gliders crashed during infiltration. In February 1943, six Norwegian saboteurs, lead by Knut Haukelid, supplied and trained by the British, dynamited the heavy water facilities and disrupted production at Norsk-Hydro for two months. Upon seeing a resumption of German production at the site, the RAF and American Eighth Air Force dropped over 400 bombs on the plant on November 16, 1943, inflicting only light damage.
This raid, however, had positive results in that it persuaded the German authorities that Norsk-Hydro was an unsafe location for their heavy water production. Berlin decided to move every-thing back to Germany. This was a fatal mistake.
British intelligence learned of the timing and route of the German shipment of heavy water to Germany, and positioned a Norwegian saboteur, Knut Haukelid, aboard a ferry Hydro carrying all 600 kilograms of Germany’s heavy water across Lake Tinnsjoe in Norway while enroute to Germany. The ferry Hydro sank and, with it, Germany’s hopes of getting an atomic bomb before the end of World War II. This was the first nuclear counter-proliferation operation in history and it worked.
Uncertain of this fact, however, the allies continued to fear that Germany might achieve the bomb and snatch final victory from defeat before they could overcome the Nazi forces in the field. Allied bombers continued to pound and destroy a number of German research laboratories until the end of the war, further retarding Nazi A-bomb possibilities.
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“SKIS AGAINST THE ATOM” By Knut Haukelid. The sabotage of the Nazi’s supply of “heavy water” in WWII Norway. Softcover, 1989. WP080 $11.95