Boris Pash, leader of the Alsos Mission, was about twenty miles ahead of the advanced elements of the Seventh Army, General Groves explains (in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project), as they pushed through the Bavarian Alps:
Finding the bridge into Urfeld destroyed, his group of eight dismounted from their vehicles and joined a ten-man reconnaissance patrol, entering Urfeld in the late afternoon of May 2. About an hour later, a German unit tried to pass through the town and a hot fire fight broke out. Shortly afterward, the patrol withdrew, leaving Pash in control of the town but alone. I could never straighten out in my own mind just what happened that night. But the following will give a general picture.
At sundown Pash was told that a German general wished to see him. The general was admitted and immediately surrendered his entire division to the very surprised chief of the Alsos mission. Pash, thinking fast, replied that it was getting late and he did not wish to bother his own general, who was right behind him with a large force, with any formalities that night; so the Germans would have to wait until morning to have their surrender officially accepted. No sooner had the first general departed than another German commander, this time of seven or eight hundred men, arrived and the procedure was repeated. By now, Pash was thoroughly alarmed for the safety of his infinitesimal force, and, as soon as it became thoroughly dark, he withdrew quietly toward the American lines. Shortly before this he had found Heisenberg, but with the difficult situation confronting him he felt it wiser to leave him in his home for the time being. During the night, he was able to obtain the support of an infantry battalion. He returned at dawn on May 3 and picked up Heisenberg, who was waiting in an office with his bag already packed. When Pash entered, Heisenberg greeted him with: “I have been expecting you.” Heisenberg was immediately evacuated to Heidelberg.
Pash’s last effort typified the boldness with which he carried out every one of his operations, and clearly demonstrated his ability to stick to his objective, which, in this case, had been to catch Heisenberg. Heisenberg was one of the world’s leading physicists and, at the time of the German break-up, he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans. Had he fallen into Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them. As it was, he has always remained on the side of the West. Judging from other actions taken at that time, we seemed to be almost alone in our appreciation of the potential value of German scientists to the Russians. With Heisenberg in our custody, all his colleagues began to talk freely. We soon learned that, although Gerlach had been in administrative charge of the work, he had only a superficial knowledge of its technical details. Diebner was not particularly co-operative and seemed to be rather antagonistic toward Heisenberg. Gerlach and Heisenberg were on cordial terms and appeared to consider Diebner an inferior scientist. Heisenberg was, outwardly at least, actively anti-Nazi, but was nevertheless strongly nationalistic. None of them seemed to know very much about the Allies’ nuclear fission efforts; Gerlach spoke several times of the poor quality of German technical intelligence. There was no German counterpart of Alsos.
After Hamburg fell, Harteck was captured. He had written a letter on April 24, 1939, in which he advised the War Ministry that:
We take the liberty of calling to your attention the newest development in nuclear physics which in our opinion will perhaps make it possible to produce an explosive which is many orders of magnitude more effective than the present one … it is obvious that if the possibility of energy production outlined above can be realized, which certainly is within the realm of possibility, that country which first makes use of it, has an unsurpassable advantage over the others.
However, Harteck, like the other German scientists, seemed to have come to feel that, while there was some hope of producing energy from a uranium pile, it was unlikely, if not entirely impossible, that a workable weapon could be developed. The various possibilities open to the Germans were never systematically and completely investigated. This was because their work was seriously deficient in over-all direction, unity of purpose and coordination between the participating agencies. Originally, there had been a number of more or less competing groups, one under Army Ordnance, another under the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, and still another under the Postal Department.
There was continual bickering, as might be expected, over supplies and material, and surprisingly enough, in the light of most American scientists’ pleas for freedom from the restrictions of compartmentalization, there was a generally nonco-operative attitude regarding the exchange of information between the various groups. Many German scientists worked alone on their individual projects and did not seem to feel any compulsion to work for the national interest. The basic reason for this was probably the generally accepted belief that the development of a nuclear weapon was not possible.
In any case, the development of nuclear energy in Germany never got beyond the laboratory stage, and even there the principal consideration was its use for power rather than for explosives. Other scientific objectives seemed to be more important and received greater governmental attention and support.
The status of the German effort at the close of the war in Europe was reminiscent of the early phases of our project in the United States, when committees were appointed only to be superseded by other committees. At times it seemed as though more thought had to be devoted to organization than to solving the problems under study.
Boris Pash led an interesting life:
Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky was born in San Francisco, California, on 20 June 1900. His father was Reverend Theodore Pashkovsky (who would become Most Reverend Metropolitan Theophilus from 1934 to 1950), a Russian Orthodox priest and later archbishop who had been sent to California by the Church in 1894.
[…]
One of Boris´s earliest memories was of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
His father was recalled to Russia in 1906, and the entire family returned to Russia in 1913.
In 1916–1917, both father and son joined the ranks of the Russian army as it fought against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I: Theodore – as a military chaplain, and 16-year-old Boris – as an artillery private to the 52nd Infantry Division. During the Russian Revolution, the family fled to Simferopol, Crimea, where Boris worked for the YMCA. By February 1920, Boris joined the White navy in the Black Sea and served on the navy cruiser General Kornilov. Boris saw action against the Bolsheviks at sea, and in March 1920, he was awarded the Cross of St. George, fourth class.
On 1 July 1920, he married Lydia Vladimirovna Ivanova, and chose to return to the United States when the Bolshevik consolidation of power became apparent. He was able to secure employment with the YMCA in Berlin, where his son Edgar Constantine Boris Pashkovsky was born on 14 June 1921.
Upon returning to the United States with his family in 1923, he attended Springfield College, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Physical Education. It was during this time that he changed the family name from Pashkovsky to Pash.
Pash taught and coached baseball at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles from 1924 until 1940, where students included Lana Turner, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney. During this time he continued his education, receiving a Master of Science in Education from the University of Southern California in 1939. He also joined the United States Army Reserve, and was assigned to the Infantry Intelligence Branch. As part of his training, he qualified for certification by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.