Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Groves chose as the unit’s military and administrative leader Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, an FBI-trained security officer whose Russian émigré father was the senior Eastern Orthodox bishop of North America. Partly as a consequence of his background, Pash loathed communists. In 1943 he had investigated Oppenheimer’s alleged communist leanings. Oppenheimer had admitted to Pash that he and scientists at Berkeley had been approached by a Berkeley academic acting for the Soviet Union. He refused to reveal the man’s name but insisted he had not divulged any information. Unconvinced by Oppenheimer’s protestations of innocence, an alarmed Pash had told Groves that Oppenheimer could well be a spy. Only after Pash’s departure to Alsos was the matter cleared up. Oppenheimer revealed to Groves that the mysterious academic was Haakon Chevalier, a left-leaning professor of French literature at Berkeley, who had been trying to recruit Oppenheimer’s brother Frank to spy for the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer assured Groves that he had advised Frank to have nothing to do with Chevalier.

Sam Goudsmit, the multilingual theoretical physicist who had left Holland in the 1920s to work in the United States, was appointed head of the Alsos scientific team. As a student in Amsterdam, he had studied scientific techniques for solving crimes. He had no detailed knowledge of the Allied bomb project, so that, as he later wrote, “I was expendable and if I fell into the hands of the Germans they could not hope to get any major bomb secrets out of me.” He was also “personally acquainted with many of the European scientists, knew their specialities, and spoke their languages.” Werner Heisenberg had been his guest in Ann Arbor in July 1939 during his final visit to the United States before the war.

Since then Heisenberg had, unknown to Goudsmit, been asked to help the latter’s elderly Jewish parents. When the Nazis announced the deportation to concentration camps of Holland’s Jews, the Dutch physicist Dirk Coster, who had worked so hard to save Lise Meitner, asked Heisenberg to use his influence to aid the Goudsmits. In February 1943 Heisenberg sent Coster a letter for him to show the authorities. It pointed out that the Goudsmits’ son was an eminent scientist in the United States and that their fate would attract attention abroad. It also emphasized Goudsmit’s supposed admiration for Germany. Heisenberg concluded that he personally “would be very sorry, if for reasons unknown to me” the Goudsmits suffered “any difficulties.” However, the letter arrived too late to have any influence.

In March 1943 in America Sam Goudsmit received a note from his parents bearing the address of a Nazi concentration camp. After that he heard no more.

On 25 August 1944 Boris Pash and an advance team from Alsos entered Paris with the first Allied troops. Dodging rooftop sniper fire, they found Frederic Joliot-Curie safe at the College de France and very grateful to see them. He told Pash he had been afraid for his life. Goudsmit followed two days later. The Frenchman claimed that German scientists had learned nothing of military value during their years working at his college, where, in the last days of the occupation, he had turned his hand to making Molotov cocktails.

By 7 September the Alsos team were in newly liberated Brussels. Pash was shocked to see alleged Nazi collaborators—“haggard and wild-looking” men and women—penned up in the zoo in cages whose original occupants had been destroyed or eaten. Finding their way through the shabby, war-sullied streets to the offices of the Union Miniere, the Alsos team were not surprised to find evidence that most of the company’s uranium stockpiled in Belgium had been taken by the Germans in 1940. Searching through the paperwork for clues to where the uranium had gone, Goudsmit found references to a chemist employed by the German Auer Company but based in Paris. Following the trail back to Paris, Goudsmit discovered little about uranium but unearthed papers showing that, shortly before the liberation, the chemist had ordered a large stock of thorium to be sent to Germany. Since the Alsos team knew that thorium could be used to make fissionable material for an atom bomb, as Goudsmit later recalled, “this really scared us.” Some weeks later Goudsmit discovered the farcical rather than sinister reasons for spiriting away the thorium. As he later wrote, Auer still had a patent on thoriated toothpaste, as used by James Chadwick, and “were already dreaming of their advertising for the future. ‘Use toothpaste with thorium! Have sparkling, brilliant teeth—radioactive brilliance!’”

While awaiting the moment when the Alsos team could enter the Reich itself, Sam Goudsmit, at last, had the opportunity to visit his childhood home in The Hague. He wrote:

Driving my jeep through the maze of familiar streets… I dreamed that I would find my aged parents at home waiting for me just as I had last seen them…. The house was still standing but as I drew near to it I noticed that all the windows were gone. Parking my jeep round the corner so as to avoid attention, I climbed through one of the empty windows. The place was a shambles. Everything that could possibly be burned had been taken away by the Hollanders themselves to use as fuel that last cold winter of the occupation….

Climbing into the little room where I had spent so many hours of my life, I found a few scattered papers, among them my high-school report cards that my parents had saved so carefully through all these years…. As I stood there in that wreck that had once been my home, I was gripped by that shattering emotion all of us have felt who have lost family and relatives and friends at the hands of the murderous Nazis—a terrible feeling of guilt. Maybe I could have saved them.… Now I wept for the heavy feeling of guilt in me. I have learned since that mine was an emotion shared by many who lost their nearest and dearest to the Nazis. Alas! My parents were only two among the four million victims taken in filthy, jampacked cattle trains to the concentration camps from which it was never intended they were to return.

The world has always admired the Germans so much for their orderliness. They are so systematic; they have such a sense of correctness. That is why they kept such precise records of their evil deeds, which we later found in their proper files in Germany. And that is why I know the precise date my father and my blind mother were put to death in the gas chamber. It was my father’s seventieth birthday.

Four months later, the Alsos mission reached Strasbourg in Alsace and went at once to the university to look for von Weizsacker. In his hurry to flee he had left a stack of revealing paperwork, including letters showing that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics had moved to Hechingen. They even gave the address and phone number, making Goudsmit wish “we could fly to Switzerland and call them up from there!” He and his colleagues “studied the papers by candlelight for two days and nights until our eyes began to hurt.” By the end of January 1945 Goudsmit felt confident enough to inform Washington that although the Germans were clearly investigating the military applications of nuclear fission, their work was still at an experimental stage and the immediate focus appeared to be nuclear power rather than weapons. In other words, “Germany had no atomic bomb.”

General Groves and U.S. military intelligence were reassured but wanted conclusive proof. With the war fast drawing to a close, Groves had an additional worry: how to prevent key German fission scientists and facilities from falling into the hands of the Russians. In February 1945 the Allies had agreed which zones of a defeated Germany each would occupy. Groves was especially concerned that the Auer Company uranium-processing factory at Oranienburg outside Berlin would be in the Russian zone. He successfully arranged for it to be destroyed from the air, but keeping individuals out of Russian hands was more difficult. The Alsos team was detailed to locate and take into custody Germany’s key atomic scientists.