Yeah, I really disliked the obit for exactly this reason. In its efforts to celebrate the man's life, they have blown his actual role out of proportion, giving a very misleading vision of this history. Granted, the obit is hardly the first to do this: the idea that the US and Germany were in a neck and neck "race for the atomic bomb" that was only just thwarted through heroic action on behalf of the Allies makes for such good theatre that one can find it repeated ad nauseam from the 1940s through the present. But it has been known to be false since 1945.

There is no real reason to believe the raid on Norsk Hydro was consequential with regards to serious German work towards a bomb. This is because, as the Allies discovered later, the Germans had already decided not to pursue a serious bomb program in the year before. They instead were pursuing a modest reactor program that, even if they had the heavy water, would not have been much of a threat. Disrupting the heavy water did throw problems into their reactor program, but it was never a large program to begin with.

I get why for an obit, they want to make the guy seem like a big hero. And it was certainly a heroic action! But that's a separate question from whether it turned out to be consequential.

The other problem I have with the obit, which says more about the NY Times than it does the history, is this line:

Historians have long debated how close Hitler came to nuclear weapons. A German writer, Rainer Karlsch, claimed in “Hitler’s Bomb” (2005), that German physicists conducted three nuclear tests in 1944 and 1945. But he gave no proof. A more widely accepted view is that Hitler’s program, which predated the Manhattan Project, faltered in midwar because of scientific errors and Norway’s successful saboteurs.

I mean, what a terrible paragraph. "Historians have long debated" — we have not long-debated whether the Germans got close to a bomb. That they did not is well-accepted. What has been debated is why they didn't get close to a bomb.

And yet the only "historian" they quote is Karlsch, who, as they note, made assertions 13 years ago, with no strong evidence then or since. (Nobody has even bothered to translate his work into English, as an aside!) You'd think that one person making a low-evidence assertion over a decade ago wouldn't warrant being listed as the only historian on this question, or as some key source that everyone needed to be familiar with.

Here's how another historian, a more respected one, Mark Walker, describes the impact of the heavy water sabotage attacks:

Traditionally this Allied attack has been celebrated as an act of heroic resistance on the part of the Norwegians and the British. While this interpretation should not be denied, it does not represent the full story. By this time, there was no chance that Germany could have produced nuclear weapons before the foreseeable end of the war. In other words, the heavy water that had been sunk could not have been used effectively by the German nuclear power project to make nuclear explosives. It is very likely that the individuals who carried out the sabotage had been told only that the destruction of the heavy water would be a crippling blow to Germany's ability to wage war. It is easy to understand why they felt that these raids were both necessary and worth the loss of life. Nevertheless, as the members of the German nuclear power project themselves were aware, by the time the first acts of sabotage took place in Norway, the threat of German nuclear weapons was only a German fantasy and an Allied bad dream.*

But I suppose that makes for a less-interesting obituary.

* Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the quest for nuclear power, 1939-1949,, Cambridge University Press, 1989, on 138-139.