It was November 26, 1944, and Strasbourg, France, was still under attack. The cobblestone streets of this medieval city were in chaos. Three days before, the Second French Armored Division had chased the Germans out of town and officially liberated the city from the Nazis, but now the Allies were having a difficult time holding the enemy back. German mortar rounds bombarded the streets. Air battles raged overhead, and in the center of town, inside a fancy apartment on Quai Klébar, armed U.S. soldiers guarded the Dutch-American particle physicist Samuel Goudsmit as he sat in an armchair scouring files. The apartment belonged to a German virus expert named Dr. Eugen Haagen, believed to be a key developer in the covert Nazi biological weapons program. Haagen had apparently fled his apartment in a hurry just a few days prior, leaving behind a framed photograph of Hitler on the mantel and a cache of important documents in the cabinets.
Goudsmit and two colleagues, bacteriological warfare experts Bill Cromartie and Fred Wardenberg, had been reading over Dr. Haagen’s documents for hours. Based on what was in front of them, they planned to be here all night. Most of Strasbourg was without electricity, so Goudsmit and his colleagues were reading by candlelight.
Samuel Goudsmit led a unit engaged in a different kind of battle than the one being fought by the combat soldiers and airmen outside. Goudsmit and his team were on the hunt for Nazi science—German weaponry more advanced than what the Allies possessed. Goudsmit was scientific director of this Top Secret mission, code-named Operation Alsos, an esoteric and dangerous endeavor that was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. Goudsmit and his colleagues were far more accustomed to working inside a laboratory than on a battlefield, and yet here they were, in the thick of the fight. It was up to these men of science to determine just how close the Third Reich was to waging atomic, biological, or chemical warfare against Allied troops. This was called A-B-C warfare by Alsos. An untold number of lives depended on the success of the operation.
Samuel Goudsmit had qualities that made him the mission’s ideal science director. Born in Holland, he spoke Dutch and German fluently. At age twenty-three he had become famous among fellow physicists for identifying the concept of electron spin. Two years later he earned his PhD at the University of Leiden and moved to America to teach. During the war, Goudsmit worked on weapons development through a government-sponsored lab at MIT. This gave him unique insight into the clandestine world of atomic, biological, and chemical warfare and had put him in this chair, reading quickly in the flickering candlelight. Just days before, Goudsmit’s team had captured four of Hitler’s top nuclear scientists and had learned from them that the Nazis’ atomic bomb project had been a failure. This was an unexpected intelligence coup for Alsos—and a huge relief. The focus now turned to the Reich’s biological weapons program, rumored to be well advanced.
Goudsmit and his team of Alsos agents knew that the University of Strasbourg had been doubling as a biological warfare research base for the Third Reich. Once a bastion of French academic prowess, this four-hundred-year-old university had been taken over by the Reich Research Council, Hermann G?ring’s science organization, in 1941. Since then, the university had been transformed into a model outpost of Nazi science. Most of the university’s professors had been replaced with men who were members of the Nazi Party and of Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
On this November night, Goudsmit made the decision to have his team set up camp in Professor Haagen’s apartment and read all the documents in a straight shot. Alsos security team members set their guns aside, organized a meal of Krations on the dining room table, and settled in to a long night of cards. Goudsmit and the biological weapons experts Cromartie and Wardenberg sat back in Professor Haagen’s easy chairs and worked on getting through all the files. Night fell and it began to snow, adding confusion to the scene outside. Hours passed.
Then Goudsmit and Wardenberg “let out a yell at the same moment,” remembered Goudsmit, “for we had both found papers that suddenly raised the curtain of secrecy for us.” There in Professor Haagen’s apartment, “in apparently harmless communication, lay hidden a wealth of secret information available to anyone who understood it.” Goudsmit was not deciphering code. The papers were not stamped Top Secret. “They were just the usual gossip between colleagues… ordinary memos,” Goudsmit recalled. But they were memos that were never meant to be found by American scientists. The plan was for the Third Reich to rule for a thousand years.