Between 1940 and 1945, thousands of Norwegians fought in Norway's Resistance movement against the occupying Nazis. More than 2,000 of them, both men and women, died in action, by execution, or in concentration camps.
The Norwegian heavy water sabotage was a series of actions taken by Norwegian saboteurs during World War II to prevent the German nuclear energy project from acquiring heavy water which could be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Between 1942 and 1944 a sequence of sabotage actions by the Norwegian resistance movement, as well as Allied bombing, ensured the destruction of the plant and the loss of the heavy water produced. These operations — codenamed "Freshman", "Grouse" and "Gunnerside" — finally managed to knock the plant out of production in early 1943, basically ending the German research.
The raid was later dubbed by the British SOE as the most successful act of sabotage in all of World War II.
