Background
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. Because of 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.
After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 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. He arrived at his first scheduled stop, Oslo, Norway, on October 30, 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 November 1, which asked 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 longtime British friend Henry Cobden 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 at that time 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 April 9, 1940, this communication route was no longer feasible. Mayer then returned to Germany. Although Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and was imprisoned in concentration camps until the war ended, the Nazis never knew of the Oslo Report.
Read more about this topic: Oslo Report
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