An enquiry showed that his mother was indeed living in Hechingen. A streetcar ticket showed that he had been in Berlin only two weeks before, and a hotel bill showed that he visited the little village of Hechingen in southern Germany, where the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics had been relocated in 1943 to escape bombing.Īlsos was convinced Petersen had went to Hechingen to visit the German nuclear-research project, but Petersen swore he went there only to visit his mother. Petersen, like most Germans, happened to be a very systematic guy who documented each and everything he did during his travels across Europe. “Either he was hiding something or he really didn’t know what it was all about,” wrote Goudsmit.ĭisappointed by the way the interrogation was proceeding, Goudsmit began studying the numerous documents contained in the suitcase. We had high hopes that we finally had found somebody who inside information about the German uranium project,” wrote Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch physicist and a member of Alsos.Īlsos grilled their prime quarry for hours in a hotel room in Paris, but with little success. “Here was our own first real Alsos Mission prisoner.
#RADIUM JAW FELL OFF FULL#
With him was a suitcase full of documents. Photo: Museum of RadiumĮventually they captured a representative of the German chemical company, named Herr Doktor Petersen. The news scared the Allies because it indicated that the German atomic research was further advanced than previously thought, as thorium can be used in an atomic-bomb project only when that project was well into the advanced stage.ĭoramad Radioactive Toothpaste. Members of the “Alsos mission”, as it was called, soon learned that a German chemical company named Auergesellschaft had been shipping massive supplies of thorium to Germany.
In the late 1943, while the Manhattan project was underway, a team of spies were sent to Europe to gather information about how the Nazis were faring in the development of nuclear technology.
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