Operation Epsilon

In 1944, the ALSOS mission, under scientific leadership of Samuel Goudsmit, was tasked with closely following the Western Allied invading forces to locate and seize individuals, documents, and materials related to the German Atomic Bomb program.

Goudsmit hand-picked ten individuals who were apprehended, mostly in Hechingen, by a joint Anglo-American raiding party led by Colonel Boris Pash, the key military figure of ALSOS.

[4] Hechingen, located on the eastern edge of the Black Forest, was where the majority of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Physik, including an incomplete nuclear reactor pile that had been moved after being bombed out in Berlin.

Walther Gerlach expected respect for the "plenipotentiary for nuclear physics" in Germany; he was shocked when he asked for a glass of water and was told by the guard to "look for an empty can in the trash barrel".

[6] Farm Hall, a country house in Godmanchester, Huntingdonshire (now in Cambridgeshire), had been used by M.I.6 and S.O.E for agents who were to be flown into occupied Europe from RAF Tempsford but was vacant.

He also recommended to Menzies, the head of M.I.6, that the house be fitted with microphones to gauge the physicists' reactions to Allied progress with the dropping of the bomb.

[11] Heisenberg specifically thought that the amount of Uranium 235 needed at critical mass was about a thousand times more than what would make an atomic bomb explode.

[12] Some of the scientists indicated that they were happy that they had not been able to build a nuclear bomb for Adolf Hitler, while others more sympathetic to the Nazi party (Diebner and Gerlach) were dismayed at having failed.

On 24 February 1992 the BBC broadcast a Horizon drama-documentary entitled Hitler's Bomb based on the events at Farm Hall and examining the reasons for the failure of the German nuclear weapons program.

[15] The play received its American premiere with the Topanga Actors Company directed by Judith Hendra, running from 17 January to 2 February 2025 at the Promenade Playhouse in West Los Angeles.