Alsos mission
Alsos was the code name of three US secret service missions carried out between late 1943 and late 1945 as part of the United States' Manhattan Project . The aim was to find out whether there was a German project to build an atomic bomb , and if so, who the scientists involved were and how far the efforts had progressed, and to prevent their continuation. Many internationally important nuclear physicists of this time were Germans and worked in Germany, for example Werner Heisenberg , Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker , Walther Gerlach , Otto Hahn and Kurt Diebner .
The name Alsos - Greek for grove, engl. grove - was elected in honor of the unit's chief commander, General Leslie R. Groves , although normal intelligence practice could too easily bring him into contact with any of the actors. Groves was the military director of the Manhattan Project and the initiator of Alsos.
Like the whole Manhattan project, the Alsos missions were also kept under strict secrecy, including from war allies. They were carried out by a military team led by Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash together with a scientific team led by Samuel Goudsmit . There were three missions: Alsos I in Italy, Alsos II in France and Alsos III in Germany. The headquarters were in London.
Alsos I
In Italy, scientists who had contact with German researchers were interviewed, but no important findings were obtained.
Alsos II
In France, further investigations were carried out immediately after the liberation by the Allies. On August 29, 1944, Frédéric Joliot-Curie was flown to London to report there in more detail about the German uranium project and the work of German physicists who had worked in his laboratory during the time of the occupation . These included Erich Schumann , Kurt Diebner , Walther Bothe , Abraham Esau , Wolfgang Gentner and Erich Bagge , with which some of the interested German scientists were identified. Other documents were seized from France, as well as sensitive material such as uranium and heavy water .
Alsos III
In many places files and equipment were sent. Heinz Maier-Leibnitz has described how he brought half a gram of radium (radioactivity 1/2 Curie = 18.5 × 10 9 Becquerel ) in a lead container by bicycle from Heidelberg to Tauberbischofsheim , where Walther Bothes institute had moved into alternative quarters in a school .
In mid-March 1945 the first allied troops crossed the Rhine from Ludwigshafen to Mannheim . Alsos employees were already among these troops. The first destination was the important university town, which was also the location of the only German cyclotron - Heidelberg . The cyclotron was located in what was then the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, which was headed by Walther Bothe. The takeover of the institute took place without incident.
When the scientists around Heisenberg were preparing the B-8 experiment (see Haigerloch research reactor ), the Alsos mission had already reached Heidelberg (Heidelberg was captured on March 30, 1945). There they interrogated Bothe and confiscated his work. But since their most important target was Heisenberg and his research group, they decided - although Haigerloch was in the French occupied territory - to take up the remaining scientists in Haigerloch, Hechingen and Tailfingen . The “ atomic cellar ” in Haigerloch, in which the test facility was set up, was dismantled and the uranium and heavy water that had previously been hidden was removed.
It was an important project to prevent scientific know-how from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. Laboratories in Hechingen and Frankfurt am Main , where work was being carried out on the uranium project, were captured and the scientists involved were taken into custody. The captured scientists were interned at the Farm Hall estate in England and wiretapped for several months (code name Operation Epsilon ).
When the physicist Walther Bothe at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg was interviewed, he listed the scientists who were involved in the German uranium project . At the same time he informed Goudsmit that he had burned all of his secret reports in accordance with the government's instructions. Bothe repeatedly expressed the opinion that it is still decades away from the realization of the “uranium machine” and its use as an energy source and that uranium as an explosive cannot be used in practice. His younger colleague, the physicist Wolfgang Gentner, believed that the bomb was simply impossible because of the difficulty in separating uranium isotopes .
Bothe had already destroyed all of his documents on war-related research and refused to make any statements until the German government officially surrendered. Most of the other members of the so-called Uranium Association were interned in England for six months, but surprisingly Bothe was released and stayed in Heidelberg. The reason for this was probably the fact that the leading Alsos scientist Samuel Goudsmit knew and respected Bothe personally. Bothe handed over all remaining documents to Alsos, but did not want to comment on secret research at his institute. On the other hand, Bothe's equipment was confiscated, his laboratory was occupied by the US Army, and Germany was banned from research in nuclear physics until the 1950s.
The Alsos project ended on October 15, 1945.
Shortly after his return to Germany, Hahn had the following to say about his work during the war and about nuclear weapons :
“The question of whether it is possible to generate energy through a chain reaction is of a physical nature. It was worked on by a group of institutes, the most important of which was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin-Dahlem under the direction of Prof. Heisenberg and the institute for physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg under the direction of Prof. Bothe. My own institute (the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem), with the approval of the relevant authorities, preferably took on the purely scientific chemical investigation of the elements that arise during the fission of uranium.We were also able to publish several papers on this question during the war . "
There was also intensive research by the Alsos mission about possible German and Italian preparations for biological warfare. This is reported in detail in Erhard Geissler's book Biologische Waffen - not in Hitler's arsenals (see bibliography).
literature
- Michael Schaaf: Heisenberg, Hitler and the bomb. Conversations with contemporary witnesses , Berlin: GNT-Verlag, 2001, ISBN 978-3-928186-60-5 . (It also includes an interview with the German physicist Rudolf Fleischmann, who describes his interrogation by the Alsos people.)
- Samuel Abraham Goudsmit: Alsos. The failure in German science . Sigma Books, London 1947.
- Leo James Mahoney: A history of the War Department Scientific Intelligence Mission Alsos, 1943-1945 . Kent, Ohio, Kent State University, Diss., 1981
- Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb . Simon & Schuster, New York 1986, ISBN 0-671-44133-7 .
- Michael Bar-Zohar: The hunt for the German scientists 1944-1960 . Ullstein publishing house, Frankfurt am Main, 1966.
- Erhard Geißler: Biological weapons - not in Hitler's arsenals. Biological and toxin weapons in Germany from 1915 to 1945 . (It also includes an excerpt from Goudsmit's report from 1945, which lists ten areas of particular interest to the mission; pp. 726–727.)
- Erhard Geissler and John Ellis van Courtland Moon (eds.): Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development and Use from the Middle Ages to 1945 . SIPRI. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Samuel A. Goudsmit: Alsos . AIP Press, Woodbury, NA 1996, p. 26.