Failure

While the war was on, no man in all Germany worried the Allies more. Last spring, British-American intelligence combat teams went into collapsing Germany to get him and find out what he knew about the development of atomic explosives. They caught him at Tailfingen, and spirited him away.

Around the world, scientists wondered what had happened to Dr. Otto Hahn, 66-year-old head of the chemistry department of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the man who first smashed the uranium atom. At least one U.S. university (Chicago) wanted to offer the German scientist a position.

In November Dr. Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for his researches in atomic physics. He heard about it, he wrote his wife in Germany, from a radio broadcast. To the Nobel Prize Committee he expressed his gratitude and his regret that he could not set a date to receive the prize because of "certain circumstances."

Last week, British sources announced that Dr. Hahn and some ten other German scientists had been living on a farm 40 miles outside of London. Their answers to questioning had shown that, despite Hitler's frantic calls for a superweapon, German science had lagged three years behind the Allies in developing atomic discoveries.

World mastery had been in Dr. Hahn's grasp, but it had slipped away. The measure of his failure was last week's Allied decision to let him return to Germany.

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