11. Despite the evidence, rumors swirled the Germans had an atomic bomb
In late 1944, as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him, Hitler’s propaganda machine exhorted the German people to fight on, promising total victory. Speeches were peppered with references to fighters and bombers, massive new tanks all being turned out by German industry, according to the propagandists. The rockets and jet bombers were soon to be equipped with new bombs, larger and more powerful than the world had ever seen. Meanwhile, the Germans began trying to hide the evidence of their most criminal activities, and the Allies ground inexorably toward Germany itself. In December 1944, the German Army launched its final offensive on the Western Front, a thrust through Belgium to capture the port of Antwerp and split the Allies. The Germans called it Unternehmen Nordwind. To the Allies, it became known as the Battle of the Bulge.
The Germans gained some initial successes in the offensive, to the great embarrassment of the Allied intelligence community. Almost unanimously, intelligence sources assured the Allied Supreme Command the Germans were no longer capable of such an offensive. The intelligence failure prior to the Battle of the Bulge brought all intelligence gathering and analysis operations under a cloud of suspected incompetence. Though the Alsos mission knew the Germans had not completed an atomic bomb and were in fact several years away from doing so, that information remained classified. German hubris, the propaganda machine, the emergence of jet fighters over the battlefronts, and plain old gossip kept the rumors of a German super bomb alive. Alsos missions during the Battle of the Bulge stalled. It seemed to many as if the war would go on indefinitely.