Екінші дүниежүзілік соғысындағы неміс ғалымдарын ұстау операциясы

Program of the Allies during World War II

Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and June 30, 1945, as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, mainly as part of its Operation Big sweep through southwestern Germany. They were interned at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, England, from July 3, 1945, to January 3, 1946. The primary goal of the program was to determine how close Nazi Germany had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening to their conversations.

The participants of the Manhattan Project perceived themselves as being in a competition with the Germans, who had a head start due to the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn in Germany in late 1938. 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. By November 1944, the evidence gathered was sufficient to convince Goudsmit that there was no German Atomic Bomb under development. Despite this, many individuals, particularly in America, remained skeptical. The mission continued with a similar objective, primarily for intelligence purposes. 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. 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. R. V. Jones proposed that Farm Hall in England, owned by the Secret Service, would be suitable to accommodate the captured individuals. He also recommended installing microphones there before their arrival. This practice had become standard with high ranking prisoners of war since it had been observed that their private conversations could be more revealing than formal interrogations.

The scientists captured in Germany by the Alsos Mission were flown to England. Harteck said in a 1967 interview that some scientists had not adjusted to losing their German elite status. When Max von Laue was told they were on a plane to England tomorrow, he said "impossible tomorrow is my colloquium Couldn’t you have the airplane come some other time?" 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". Harteck joked with the British officer when he saw the plane taking them to England that if an "accident" was planned they would have used an older plane. 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. R V Jones suggested to Stewart Menzies that German nuclear physicists then held in France at an American internment camp known as "Dustbin" (partly because he was told that an American general had said that the best way of dealing with the post war nuclear physics problem in Germany was to shoot all their nuclear physicists). 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.

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. The documentary was produced by David Sington with dramatic reconstructions written by Nick Perry. The events at Farm Hall were dramatised on BBC Radio 4 on 15 June 2010, in "Nuclear Reactions", written by Adam Ganz, son of one of the interpreters, Peter Ganz. A play titled Operation Epsilon by Alan Brody, based on the original transcripts, received its first reading as part of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT (Boston) in 2008, followed by a workshop reading in New York in 2010, directed by Andy Sandberg and produced by Ellen Berman. Brody and Sandberg subsequently developed the play in a 2011 workshop at the Asolo Repertory Theatre (Sarasota, Florida). Prior to its world premiere production in early 2013 with the Nora Theatre Company at Central Square Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts). A further adaptation, Farm Hall by Katherine M. Moar, was performed as a staged reading at the Theatre Royal, Bath on 21 September 2019. It was later revived as a full production directed by Stephen Unwin at Jermyn Street Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Bath in 2023, and as a tour of the same production at Cambridge Arts Theatre, Perth Theatre, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Oxford Playhouse and Richmond Theatre later in 2023.