WWII hero foiled Hitler’s nuclear bomb ambitions
Norway’s Joachim Ronneberg credits ‘luck and chance.’
For a man who saved the world, or at least helped ensure that Adolf Hitler never got hold of a nuclear bomb, 96-year-old Joachim Ronneberg has a surprisingly unheroic view of the forces that shape history.
“There were so many things that were just luck and chance,” he said of his 1943 sabotage mission that blew up a Norwegian plant vital to Nazi Germany’s nuclear program.
“There was no plan. We were just hoping for the best,” added Ronneberg, Norway’s most decorated war hero.
The leader and only living member of a World War II commando team that destroyed the Nazis’ only source of heavy water, a rare fluid needed to produce nuclear weapons, Ronneberg’s exploits were celebrated in a 1965 blockbuster movie, “The Heroes of Telemark,” starring Kirk Douglas.
He’s been showered with military medals and been honored, belatedly, with a statue and museum display in his hometown here on Norway’s west coast.
M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of Britain’s wartime sabotage and intelligence service, the Special Operations Executive, which organized Ronneberg’s mission, described the raid on a Norsk Hydro plant producing heavy water in Nazi-occupied Norway as a “coup” that “changed the course of the war” and deserved the “gratitude of humanity.”
It took years before Ronneberg came to understand the exact purpose and importance of the job. All the British told him before dropping him onto a snow-covered Norwegian mountain, he said, was that a row of pipes at the Vemork plant needed to be destroyed.
“They just said it was important and had to be blown up,” he said, recalling his wartime exploits in his tidy living room, filled with family photos, including a large framed portrait of his wife, who died last year.
The only hints of his past are a few books and magazines in an adjacent study devoted to the history of the war.
He added that he knew nothing at the time about nuclear physics, heavy water or the race to build a nuclear bomb. He knew that Britain had lost more than 35 men in a disastrous 1942 attempt to sabotage the Norsk Hydro plant, but he had no idea why it was so intent on disabling a remote mountain facility whose only product as far as he knew was fertilizer.
“The first time I heard about atom bombs and heavy water was after the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in 1945, he said. “Then we started to understand our raid and why.” And also that, had it failed, London could have ended up “looking like Hiroshima.” This belated realization of the huge stakes at play “was a tremendous satisfaction,” he said.
While long celebrated by foreign, particularly British, filmmakers, the exploits of Ronneberg and nine other Norwegians involved in thwarting the Nazi nuclear project became widely known in Norway only this year, when NRK, the state broadcaster, ran “The Heavy Water War,” a six-episode miniseries that became a national sensation.
The statue of Ronneberg in front of City Hall here in Alesund was put up only last year to observe his 95th birthday.
Inscribed on its base is a message — “Peace and Freedom are not to be taken for granted” — that Ronneberg says has been ignored for too long by many in Norway, where painful memories of collaboration with the Nazis by the country’s wartime leader Vidkun Quisling and his fascist regime have stilled enthusiasm for too much digging into the past.
He said it was “quite incredible” that executives at Norsk Hydro, many of whom worked closely with the Nazis, were never prosecuted for their wartime treachery. The issue is still so delicate for a company that survived the war to become a pillar of the Norwegian economy that the television series broadcast this year altered the names of Norsk Hydro directors who had collaborated with Hitler.
A journalist and administrator with the national broadcaster for most of his postwar career, Ronneberg for decades avoided talking publicly about the 1943 mission but, worried that younger Norwegians knew little about the war, started to open up in the 1970s and has since spoken regularly at schools.
“There is a lot of talk about ‘never again,’ but this is impossible if we don’t remember what happened back then,” said Ronneberg, whose three children have all pursued careers outside the military. Remembering, he added, will only grow more difficult as his own generation dies off. “The challenge ahead is that it will be hard to interest people in history when there is nobody left alive who was a witness.”