Atomic scientist and military aircraft: a surprise passenger plane in Britain

Matt Damon addresses the crowd and declares, "We have an early Christmas gift for you." Kenneth Branagh joins in, keeping his audience thrilled. Playing General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, and nuclear physicist Niels Bohr respectively, these two famous actors announce the arrival of the Danish scientist in Los Alamos. This secret facility, established in New Mexico in 1943 to create the first atomic bomb, has been recreated 80 years later by Christopher Nolan for the filming of his epic movie "Oppenheimer."

“British pilots put me in the bomber’s compartment,” Bran says with a smile in his role as Bora with a Danish accent, “they showed me the oxygen – of course, I got confused. When I was opened up in Scotland, I was unconscious. I pretended to be dozing.” The scene barely hints at the edge of the Danish escapee’s situation from Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the incredible story of his flight to safety. While researching my new book “Mosquito” about the British Royal Air Force raid on the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, I discovered an exciting truth about both of them.

At the time of Bor's joining the Manhattan Project, he was perhaps the most famous scientist in the world after Albert Einstein. His Danish homeland had been under German occupation since April 1940.

On the day of the invasion, the professor was in his laboratory in Copenhagen, where he was trying to dissolve a couple of Nobel medals in a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid. Bohr was attempting to prevent the Nazis from seizing two 23-carat gold Nobel medals that had been entrusted to him for safekeeping by two Jewish German physicists who had fled from Hitler's anti-Semitism in Germany. He sold his own Nobel medal in 1940 to raise money to help the victims of Finland's "Winter War" with the Soviet Union. His decision to allow the institute in Copenhagen, named after him, to provide refuge to these German exiles also testified to his altruism. But it was also personal. Due to his Jewish mother, Niels Bohr was Jewish by heritage, though not by religious beliefs.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) of Britain, created in 1940 at the behest of Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze" through sabotage and incitement, initially tried to persuade Bohr to leave Denmark in 1943 by sending a secret agent to the scientist's home. Bohr's polite refusal of the invitation to London was concealed under stamps affixed to three separate postcards. The next time, the SOE sent a written message along with detailed instructions:

• “A small hole 4 mm deep was drilled in the keys. The holes were closed and hidden after the message was inserted. Professor Boru should gently wipe the keys in the specified area until the hole appears. The message can then be extracted or transferred to a micro-sample.”

A message from Bora's friend, Professor James Chadwick from the University of Liverpool, was the size of a grain of sand and was contained in a hole the width of a needle, needing to be deciphered with a microscope at 600x magnification. Chadwick urged him to leave Denmark for the UK, hinting at a "special problem, in solving which your help will be the greatest."

Chadwick, a colleague of Bohr and Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the neutron, led Britain's research on the atomic bomb.

Once again, Bor politely declined the offer, believing that he could do more good in occupied Denmark, but he had no doubt about the nature of the "special problem" his friend had mentioned. He simply did not believe that, in the current state of the art, the development of an atomic bomb was possible.

Two months later, Bohr informed Chadwick that new information had convinced him that Germany had established the capability to develop a nuclear reactor using uranium and heavy water. However, when the British scientist was preparing to take up his new position as head of the British mission at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, it still wasn't enough to persuade the "Great Dane," as he was called in the SOE, to leave Copenhagen.

Bor realized that he had to leave when the Danish woman working for the Gestapo saw the arrest order for Bor and warned his brother Harald. It was now impossible to ignore the fact of the impending actions by the Nazis against the Danish Jewish community and the threat that hung over him personally.

Bor and his wife Margaret left their home at the Carlsberg brewery estate just a few hours after the warning from Harald. Later, when the couple crawled on all fours from the beach hut to the waiting boat, the most famous man in Denmark had only one bag with him, a bottle of beer filled with heavy water taken from the laboratory, and a blueprint allegedly depicting a Nazi reactor. They had no time to gather more belongings before they were ferried across the strait to Sweden.

Nils and Margaret Borg might have thought that by arriving in Malmö they were safe from the hands of the Nazis, but neither the Gestapo nor the Danish military intelligence saw it that way.

Like Madrid, Lisbon, or Casablanca, the capital of neutral Sweden was a hotbed of military intrigue, where spies from various intelligence agencies around the world worked side by side, competing for an advantage. Secrets, lies, betrayal, and deception were the common currency in Stockholm, and couriers, agents, safe houses, invisibility, surveillance, and codes were the means by which they traded. And with the arrival of the world's most famous nuclear physicist, they had a prize worth playing for.

At first, the Swedish authorities did not want to acknowledge that Bor was at risk of kidnapping or murder, telling the Danish army captain responsible for his protection: "This is Stockholm, not Chicago."

The captain replied that when it comes to ruthlessness and cruelty, no gangster can compare to the Gestapo, and that "if anything happens to the professor, it will be a disgrace for your country." The captain did not leave Bor's side while they were in Sweden. But now three more armed Swedish secret police officers joined them. Bor was taken to Stockholm, from where he was moved to a safe house.

Three days later, the Nazis, as planned, began to act against the Jews in Denmark, but it was already too late. Thanks to a warning, similar to that of Boro, about the imminent danger, they were accepted, hidden, and eventually evacuated by their compatriots. Sweden, after lobbying by Boro himself, agreed to take them all in. Out of approximately 7,000 Danish Jews, only 284 weak and vulnerable individuals were arrested.

This was even insufficient, noted a disappointed German official: "it does not justify sending a train to the concentration camp."

In order for Bor to reach safety, he now relied on the "Stockholm Express." And despite the name, it was not a train, but one of a small fleet of unarmed de Havilland Mosquito aircraft, which, operated by British Airways' predecessor BOAC - British Overseas Airways Corporation - navigated a group of Luftwaffe night fighters to transport VIP passengers between RAF Leuchars in Scotland and Bromma Airport in Sweden. Passengers sat in the cozy compartments of the Mosquito bombers. This flight nearly cost Bor his life. And this could be unreservedly blamed on the impeccable performance of the Mosquito. The very option of packing a VIP passenger into the belly of a military aircraft was related to ball bearings.

For 35 years, the Swedish company SKF led the world in the production of high-quality ball bearings, opening factories in the UK, Germany, France, and the United States. However, with the onset of World War II, their factory in Luton, England, despite operating day and night, could not meet the demand. Each Avro Lancaster bomber for the RAF required over 175 pounds of quality ball bearings, and they rolled off the production line at a rate of about 25 per week. But there were also Spitfire and Hurricane planes, among many others. The UK had numerous types of aircraft powered by various engines, and each required its own ball bearings. This was not limited to aircraft; tanks, armored vehicles, and...