WHEN five British servicemen on a mission to disrupt Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons programme crash-landed in Norway in the winter of 1942 they still hoped to escape with their lives.

But documents released yesterday at the National Archives in Kew, southwest London, described how they were betrayed by the villagers they approached for help, interned in a prisoner-of-war camp and then executed under orders from Berlin.

Details of the murders were contained in witness reports compiled for use at a war crimes trial after the end of the Second World War.

The men, all Royal Engineers, had been assigned to Operation Freshman, a mission to destroy a heavy water plant in Rjukan, Norway. It was feared that the plant had a crucial role in Germany’s effort to build the first atomic bomb. A later raid against the plant formed the basis for the 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris and Michael Redgrave.

Most of the crew were killed when their glider crashed in dense November fog. According to the files the mountainside was strewn with wreckage.

But Lance-Corporal Wallis Jackson, 28, and Sappers Frank Bonner, 25, James Blackburn, 21, Thomas White, 23 and John Walsh, 21, survived. Three were injured and the other two walked to the nearest village where they asked the lensmann, or village mayor, for help.

Instead he telephoned the German authorities, who arrested the men and forced them to lead them to the wrecked glider and their wounded comrades. The five were taken to a camp near Oslo, where they were interrogated.

In January 1943, with the war beginning to turn against Germany on the Eastern Front, orders were issued to shoot all commandos as saboteurs.

Together with a sixth British serviceman, Seaman Robert Evans, who had been captured on a separate mission, the five engineers were led into Trandum forest, blindfolded and shot in the head. Their bodies were thrown into a makeshift grave by a German soldier who later boasted about the killings.

Workers at the camp had been sent home just before the summary executions. When they returned they found blood and pieces of flesh in the snow and blood-soaked clothing.

A Norwegian soldier, Kurt Hagedorn, said he had been told that the British squad were to be regarded as saboteurs, as they had civilian clothing underneath their uniforms. “However, I have not seen that,” he said. “They were also alleged to have carried explosives and poison in order to poison our drinking water.”

But in an affidavit, Karl Maria von Behren, a lieutenant-general in the German Army, expressed regret that the men had been killed before he was given a chance to question them. He described the matter as “very painful”. “I could not reconcile it with my conscience and it weighed very heavily on my heart,” he said.

After the war the six bodies were exhumed and given a ceremonial burial near Oslo.

The heavy water plant was later destroyed by Norwegian resistance fighters.

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