A GERMAN BOMB

Strasbourg’s emancipation brought two significant discoveries. Thirty miles southwest of the city, at Natzweiler, GIs overran their first concentration camp. Most of the seven thousand inmates still alive had been evacuated to the east, but ample evidence of atrocity remained. Built in 1941, Natzweiler had housed French résistants, Jews, homosexuals, and others deemed socially unfit; many had toiled in nearby granite quarries or munitions factories. A chamber built in an adjacent hotel had been used for poison-gas experiments, mostly against Gypsies imported from Auschwitz, and it was said that victims chosen for extermination were plied with sweets and cakes. Other human experiments involved typhus, yellow fever, and mustard gas. The corpses of gassed Jews were trucked by the score to a Strasbourg anatomy laboratory for dissection or preservation in alcohol as part of an SS study on “racial inferiority.” Other bodies were cremated, with families reportedly charged seventy-five Reichmarks to retrieve a clay urn of ashes. Seventeen thousand had died at Natzweiler and its satellite camps.

The second discovery was no less portentous. Close on the heels of Leclerc’s armored spearhead was an American intelligence unit code-named ALSOS, carrying secret instructions from the physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Luis W. Alvarez on clues to look for in investigating “the Y program”—the German atomic bomb effort. Evidence discovered in Paris and at the Philips factory in Eindhoven pointed to the University of Strasbourg as a key atomic research center. ALSOS agents darted through laboratories, offices, and homes, arresting German physicists and chemists; they retrieved unburned scraps of scientific papers stuck in the chimney of a potbelly stove. Their chief target, the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a close collaborator of the Nobel Prize– winner Werner Heisenberg, was away in Germany, but his papers, computations, and correspondence remained in Strasbourg to be confiscated by the agents. 

As Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, later wrote SHAEF, the Strasbourg seizures provided “the most complete, dependable and factual information we have obtained bearing upon the nature and extent of the German effort in our field. Fortunately it tends to confirm our conclusion that the Germans are now behind us.” Far behind: top secret assessments found that “the enemy had made practically no progress” in building a bomb, that “the effort is not large,” and that “no evidence was uncovered of any uranium work on a production scale.” Despite the Y program’s supposedly high priority, captured documents showed that German scientists had been forced to file a “certificate of urgency” for permission to buy “two slide rules for carrying out a project of military importance.” Colonel Boris T. Pash, the ALSOS commander, reported that interrogations and other evidence confirmed that “the Nazis had not progressed in atomic development as far as our own project had early in 1941.”


Rick Atkinson, (10-22-2013). The Liberation Trilogy Box Set (Kindle Locations 41756-41766). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.