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By Root 1292 0

arm during the war, created in the fall of 1943 a special unit to chase down the German secret. ‘We had to assume’, wrote Groves, ‘that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government and with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal.’ The group adopted the codename Alsos—to Groves’s horror, for alsos is Greek for ‘grove’. The work began with a largely unprofitable probe into Italy, then the dispatch to Switzerland of an extraordinary mission by the OSS agent Moe Berg, an enigmatic, multilingual, former baseball catcher with a creditable throwing arm and a deep knowledge of the game. Berg also had a basic understanding of nuclear physics. Berg’s assignment—given to him, apparently, by the OSS rather than by Groves directly—was to attend a physics lecture to be given in Zurich by Heisenberg in late December 1944. Berg carried a pistol in his suit pocket. If Heisenberg uttered a single sentence indicating that Germany was close to having an atomic bomb, Berg was to render him ‘hors de combat’, then and there, with a well-aimed gunshot or two. Heisenberg’s lecture proved to be sufficiently general in scope as to save his life.29

By that time, Alsos had mounted a systematic effort to uncover German scientific progress. Under the direction of Col. Boris Pash, who had previously tried to demonstrate that Robert Oppenheimer had been associated with communists or was one himself, and Samuel Goudsmit, the well-regarded Dutch physicist who had attended an Ann Arbor garden party with Heisenberg in July 1939, Alsos attached itself to the vanguard of Allied forces that moved into Paris in late August 1944. There they met with Frederic Joliot, who had disappointingly little information about the German bomb project and made clear his recently found dedication to communism. Mission members sampled river water in Holland as that nation was liberated, reasoning that radiation might be detected in the runoff from a German reactor; the samples were negative. (Goudsmit hurried to The Hague, his boyhood home, hoping for news of his parents, from whom he had had no word since early 1943. Among the broken window glass he found his high-school report cards. He later found an SS murder list revealing that his parents had been gassed at Auschwitz on his father’s seventieth birthday.) When Strasbourg fell in mid-1944, Pash and his team discovered at the university’s Physics Institute a handful of physicists, who were unforthcoming, and the scientific papers of Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, examination of which indicated that the Germans were well behind the Americans in their quest for an atomic bomb.30

Having thus far captured no reactors or leading scientists, the Alsos team pressed on. By April 1945, with the outcome of the war no longer in doubt, the French had been given a German occupation zone that included Hechingen and Haigerloch. Neither Pash nor his handlers had any intention of allowing any other nation to grab people who might provide valuable nuclear intelligence, so Pash hastily assembled a flying column including a pair of tanks and a handful of trucks and jeeps and rushed into Haigerloch on the morning of the 22nd. There he found the Germans’ uranium burner. Many of its uranium cubes had been taken off to a nearby barn and concealed under the hay—shadows of H. G. Wells—but a German scientist told Pash where they were hidden. Pash had the reactor blown up. On the 23rd, the Americans proceeded to Hechingen, where they found and detained Erich Bagge, Weizsacker, Max von Laue, and their colleague Karl Wirtz, then went on to Tailfingen and arrested Otto Hahn. (‘I have been expecting you,’ he said, when they arrived.) Heisenberg, the Americans’ ‘target number one’, remained at large. Worried about his family as the Western Front crumpled, Heisenberg had left Hechingen on 19 April on his bicycle, heading for home in Urfeld, some 150 miles away. Pash and a small contingent of soldiers, having bluffed then shot their way through German lines, caught