Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 30, 2015

The Alsos Mission was an Allied unit formed to investigate Axis scientific developments, especially nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Colonel Boris Pash, a former Manhattan Project security officer, was the mission's commander, and Samuel Goudsmit was its scientific leader. They joined the advancing Allied units, and occasionally operated behind enemy lines, first in Italy, and later in France and Germany. Gathering information on the German nuclear project, mission personnel captured and dismantled the German experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch (pictured) in a daring raid behind German lines in April 1945. They took senior German researchers into custody, including Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. They searched for personnel, records, and materials that might be useful, to make them available for Allied research and to keep them out of Soviet hands. Over 1,000 tons of uranium ore was recovered by the mission, along with stocks of heavy water.

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