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Oslo Report

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1939 military intelligence leak

This article needs more citations . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.<br>Find sources: "Oslo Report" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Oslo Report was one of the most spectacular leaks in the history of military intelligence. Written by German mathematician and physicist Hans Ferdinand Mayer on 1 and 2 November 1939 during a business trip to Oslo, Norway, it described several German weapons, some in service and others being developed.

Mayer mailed the Report anonymously in the form of two letters to the British Embassy in Oslo, where they were passed on to MI6 in London for further analysis, providing an invaluable resource to the British in developing counter-measures, especially to navigational and targeting radars and contributed to the British winning the Battle of Britain.

Background<br>[edit]

Hans Ferdinand Mayer received his doctorate in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1920. After spending two years as a research associate there in his doctoral supervisor's (Philipp Lenard) laboratory, he joined Siemens AG in 1922. He became interested in telecommunications and joined Siemens' communication research laboratory, becoming its director in 1936. In this position, he had contacts all over Europe and the United States and had access to a wide range of information about electronics development in Germany, especially in the military sector.

Sending the report<br>[edit]

After Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Mayer decided to divulge to the British as much as he could about military secrets to defeat the Nazi regime. He arranged a business trip to Scandinavia in late October 1939, arrived at his first scheduled stop, Oslo, Norway, on 30 October 1939 and checked into the Hotel Bristol. Mayer borrowed a typewriter from the hotel, and typed the seven-page Oslo Report in the form of two letters over two days. He mailed the first on 1 November, asking the British military attaché to arrange for the BBC World Service to alter the introduction to its German-language programme if he wished to receive the Report. This was done, and he sent the Report along with a vacuum tube from a prototype proximity fuze.

He also wrote a letter to his long-time British friend Henry Turner, asking him to communicate with him via their Danish colleague Niels Holmblad. This indirect communication path was required since Britain and Germany were at war, but Denmark was neutral. Mayer continued his travels to Denmark to visit Holmblad, asking if he could relay information between himself and Turner. Holmblad readily agreed, but once Hitler invaded Denmark on 9 April 1940, this communication route was no longer feasible. Mayer then returned to Germany; Mayer was arrested for political offenses by the Gestapo in 1943 and was imprisoned at Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps until the war ended, the Nazis never knew of the Oslo Report.

British reaction<br>[edit]

On 4 November 1939, Captain Hector Boyes, the Naval Attaché at the British Embassy in Oslo, received an anonymous letter offering him a secret report on the latest German technical developments. To receive the report, he was to arrange for the usual announcement of the BBC World Service's German-language broadcast to be changed to "Hullo, hier ist London". This was done and resulted in the delivery of a parcel a week later, which contained a typewritten document and a type of vacuum tube, a sensor for a proximity fuze for shells or bombs. The document became famous after its existence was revealed in 1947 and would go down in history as the "Oslo Report".[1] Boyes quickly appreciated the Report's potential importance and had a member of the embassy staff make a translation which he forwarded to MI6 in London along with the original.

The Oslo Report was received with indifference or even disbelief by British Intelligence, with the notable exception of Dr. R. V. Jones, a young Ph.D. physicist who had recently been put in charge of a new field called "Scientific Intelligence". Jones argued that despite the breadth of information and a few inaccuracies, the technical details were correct and argued that all the electronic systems divulged therein be further explored. In a 1940 report, Jones summarized his thoughts,

The contribution of this source to the present problem may be summarised in the statements that the Germans were bringing into use an R.D.F. [Radio Direction Finding, the British name for radar] system similar to our own,... A careful review of the whole report leaves...