10. Strasbourg became of interest to the Alsos teams in November, 1944
While the Alsos teams tracked uranium from Belgium across Europe, (more had been located in Eindhoven), others evaluated and analyzed information provided by captured scientists, logs, and research facilities. From information obtained at Rennes, Eindhoven, and other sites across Western Europe, Alsos analysts learned of extensive German scientific activities in Strasbourg. The University of Strasbourg served as a working facility for two well-known German physicists, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Rudolf Fleischmann. Both had been pre-war nuclear physicists of international fame (at least among the scientific community). Strasbourg also housed a Junkers manufacturing plant where work on jet propulsion continued in 1944. The combination of jet aircraft and atomic weapons appeared plausible to the Alsos team.
There also appeared to be evidence of work at the University of Strasbourg supported the German biological weapons program, information gleaned from documents obtained at Eindhoven. An Alsos team traveled to Saarburg after communicating with the US Sixth Army as it prepared to enter Strasbourg. On November 25, Alsos teams entered the German nuclear laboratory and captured Rudolf Fleischmann. Von Weizsacker fled before Sixth Army entered the city. They discovered records indicating the conduct of biological agent experiments in German concentration camps. Materials recovered at Strasbourg revealed the Germans had failed to develop the process for uranium enrichment required for an atomic bomb, a list of sites where experiments and research were conducted, and the personnel involved. Alsos could then state with conviction the Germans did not possess an atomic bomb, nor were they close to building one.