Alsos was an effort at the end of World War II by the Allies (principally Britain and the United States), branched off from the Manhattan Project, to investigate the German nuclear energy project, seize German nuclear resources, materials and personnel to further American research and to prevent their capture by the Soviets, and to discern how far the Germans had gone towards creating an atomic bomb. The personnel of the project followed close behind the front lines, first into Italy, and then into France and Germany, searching for personnel, records, material, and sites involved. World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrination, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons such as the atom bomb. ... When spelt with a capital A, Allies usually denotes the countries that fought together against the Central Powers in World War I and against the Axis Powers in World War II. For more information, see the related articles: Allies of World War I and Allies of World War II. Other... Control panels and operators for calutrons at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ... The German experimental nuclear pile at Haigerloch The German nuclear energy project was an endeavor by scientists during World War II in Nazi Germany to develop nuclear energy and an atomic bomb for practical use. ... The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, 1945, rose some 18 km (11 mi) above the epicenter. ...

Alsos is sometimes mistakenly written ALSOS by sources including the U.S. Army, perhaps because it does not look like a usual English word and is thus falsely assumed to be an acronym. In fact, Alsos is Greek for "grove", and so this designation is a play on the name of Major General Leslie M. Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Engineer District (the Manhattan Project), the Allied wartime effort to develop an atomic bomb (which itself was sparked out of fears of a German weapon). Groves was the major impetus behind the project, in part because of his desire to make sure that German technology and personnel did not fall into Soviet hands, so as to prolong the anticipated American monopoly on nuclear weapons as long as possible. The Army is the branch of the United States armed forces which has primary responsibility for land-based military operations. ... Leslie Groves Leslie Richard Groves (August 17, 1896 - July 13, 1970) was a member of the United States Army who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and the primary military leader in charge of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. Born in Albany, New... Control panels and operators for calutrons at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ...

Samuel Goudsmit was the technical/scientific leader of Alsos, and Lt. Col. Boris Pash, a former Manhattan Project security officer, was its military leader. Major league baseball player, attorney, and linguist, Moe Berg contributed in various phases. Samuel Goudsmit (1902–1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck. ... Boris T. Pash (1900 - 1995) was a US Army officer. ... Morris Moe Berg (March 2, 1902–May 29, 1972) was an American Major League Baseball catcher who also served briefly as a spy for the United States. ...

The project managed to find and remove many of the German research effort's personnel and a good bit of the surviving records and equipment. Most of the senior research personnel (including Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker) were sequestered at Farm Hall in England for several months. Their discussions were secretly taped, and transcripts of those tapes have been released. Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. ... Otto Hahn (March 8, 1879 – July 28, 1968) was a German chemist. ... Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (born 28 June 1912) is a German physicist. ... The Farm Hall transcripts were made during and after the second world war in Britain over the possibility of Germans producing an atomic bomb during the war. ...

In the end, Alsos concluded that the Allies had surpassed the German atomic bomb effort monumentally by 1942. Compared to the Manhattan Project, one of the largest scientific endeavors of all time, the German project was considerably underfunded and understaffed, and it is questionable whether Gerd have had the resources or isolation which were required for the Allies to produce such a weapon. Goudsmit, in a monograph published two years after the end of the war, further concluded that a principal reason for the failure of the German project was that science could not flourish under totalitarianism — an argument seemingly rebutted by the German advances on other technologies, such as world’s first jet fighter Messerschmitt Me 262, first stealth fighter-bomber Horten Ho 229, first ballistic missile V-2 and Soviet Union's development of a nuclear weapon by 1949. The Soviets, however, benefited from Stalin's extensive spy network, which included at least two well-infomred scientists at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. Both worked to prevent the United States from holding a nuclear monopoly over the world. This article is about the year. ... Totalitarianism is a typology employed by political scientists to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior. ... The Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe or swallow was the first operational jet powered fighter. ... The Horten Ho 229 (often erroneously called Gotha Go 229 due to the identity of the chosen manufacturer of the aircraft) was a late-World War II flying wing fighter aircraft, designed by the Horten brothers and built by Gothaer Waggonfabrik. ... German test launch. ... The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb began during World War II in the Soviet Union. ... 1949 (MCMXLIX) is a common year starting on Saturday. ... Iosif (usually anglicized as Joseph) Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин), original name Ioseb Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი; see Other names section) (December 21, 1879[1] – March 5, 1953) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union. ... Los Alamos National Laboratory, aerial view from 1995. ... Klaus Fuchs ID badge photo from Los Alamos. ... Theodore Halls ID badge photo from Los Alamos. ...

See also

• Alsos included Operation Big and Operation Harborage.
• Similar (but separate) attempts to remove German technical information and personnel after the war were Operation Paperclip (Overcast) (rocketry) and TICOM (cryptography).

Operation Big was a part of the overarching Allied effort (called Operation Alsos) to capture German nuclear secrets during the final days of World War II. In this portion of the operation, nuclear intelligence teams moved quickly from Freudenstadt through Horb to Haigerloch in southwest Germany. ... During the final days of World War II, Operation Harborage was part of the overall Allied operation to capture German atomic weapons scientists, material and facilities (dubbed Operation Alsos). ... Operation Paperclip scientists pose together. ... TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) was a project formed immediately after the end of World War II by the United States to find and seize German intelligence assets, particularly cryptographic ones. ...

Further reading

• Jeremy Bernstein and David Cassidy, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, 2001.
• Charles Frank, ed. Operation Epsilon: the Farm Hall transcripts, 1993.
• David Irving, Virus House, 1967. (see Irving link for discussion of Irving's reliability as an historian).
• Samuel Goudsmit, Alsos: the failure of German science, 1947.
• Mahoney, Leo J. A History of the War Department Scientific Intelligence Mission (ALSOS), 1943-1945. [Ph.D. Dissertation, Kent State University, 1981]
• Pash, Boris. The Alsos Mission. [New York: Charter Books, 1969]
• Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, 2000.
• Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), ISBN 0529219778.
• Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the quest for nuclear power, 1939-1949, 1990.