A Norwegian man who led a daring raid to sabotage Nazi Germany's nuclear weapon ambitions has died at the age of 99. The story of the World War II operation has been retold in books, TV series and a Hollywood film.
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Joachim Ronneberg, hailed as a war hero for carrying out a major attack against the Nazis in his native Norway, died Sunday at the age of 99.
As a young soldier in 1943, he was chosen to head Operation Gunnerside, which destroyed part of the Norsk Hydro plant and put a stop to Germany's nuclear weapons program.
"Ronneberg is probably the last of the best known resistance fighters to pass away," Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg told the NTB news agency. "He is one of our great heroes."
Operation Gunnerside aimed to sabotage the Nazis' World War II nuclear energy program at the Norsk Hydro plantImage: Anders Beer Wilse
Secret mission
Born in 1919 in the town of Aalesund, Ronneberg fled Norway after German forces invaded in 1940, and ended up training with the Norwegian resistance in Britain. He returned to his occupied homeland in February 1943 to lead a six-man team in a major assault on the Norsk Hydro facility in the country's south.
The plant was significant because it was the only one in the world at the time to produce large quantities of heavy water, or D2O — a deuterium-rich substance crucial to developing atomic weapons.
Ronneberg and his commando team parachuted onto a mountain plateau and skied to their heavily guarded target, sneaking into the plant on foot and setting explosive charges on the heavy water production line. As the explosives went off, the group escaped the complex unnoticed and fled hundreds of kilometers across the mountains.
They managed to avoid capture, despite a manhunt involving some 3,000 German soldiers. Two weeks later, Ronneberg skied into neighboring Sweden, a neutral country during the war.
Public figure
The daring raid was the subject of the 1965 Hollywood film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas, as well as several books, documentaries and a TV drama series.
After the end of the war, Ronneberg began working as a radio journalist and was reticent to speak about his time as a resistance fighter. It was only several decades later, in the 1970s, that he broke his silence and began speaking publicly against the dangers of war and totalitarianism.
The men who led Nazi Germany
The German National Socialist Workers' party profoundly affected the course of 20th-century world history with their ideology, propaganda and crimes. Who were the key leaders of the movement?
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Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945)
As Hitler's Propaganda Minister, the virulently anti-Semitic Goebbels was responsible for making sure a single, iron-clad Nazi message reached every citizen of the Third Reich. He strangled freedom of the press, controlled all media, arts, and information, and pushed Hitler to declare "Total War." He and his wife committed suicide in 1945, after poisoning their six children.
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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
The leader of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi) developed his anti-Semitic, anti-communist and racist ideology well before coming to power as Chancellor in 1933. He undermined political institutions to transform Germany into a totalitarian state. From 1939 to 1945, he led Germany in World War II while overseeing the Holocaust. He committed suicide in April 1945.
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Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
As leader of the Nazi paramilitary SS ("Schutzstaffel"), Himmler was one of the Nazi party members most directly responsible for the Holocaust. He also served as Chief of Police and Minister of the Interior, thereby controlling all of the Third Reich's security forces. He oversaw the construction and operations of all extermination camps, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered.
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Rudolf Hess (1894-1987)
Hess joined the Nazi party in 1920 and took part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to gain power. While in prison, he helped Hitler write "Mein Kampf." Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 to attempt a peace negotiation, where he was arrested and held until the war's end. In 1946, he stood trial in Nuremberg and was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.
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Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962)
Alongside Himmler, Eichmann was one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. As an SS Lieutenant colonel, he managed the mass deportations of Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Eastern Europe. After Germany's defeat, Eichmann fled to Austria and then to Argentina, where he was captured by the Israeli Mossad in 1960. Tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity, he was executed in 1962.
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Hermann Göring (1893-1946)
A participant in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Göring became the second-most powerful man in Germany once the Nazis took power. He founded the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, and served as Luftwaffe commander until just before the war's end, though he increasingly lost favor with Hitler. Göring was sentenced to death at Nuremberg but committed suicide the night before it was enacted.
