1944 Chemistry Nobelist

Reginald Augustine, part of secret mission to find Nazi scientists, dies at 97

Reginald C. Augustine, 97, who participated in a top-secret Army mission to hunt down Nazi scientists during World War II and determine Germany’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, died June 30 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in the District. He had pneumonia.

Mr. Augustine, who separated from the military at the rank of captain, parlayed his wartime intelligence work into a two-decade career at the CIA. As an operations officer, Mr. Augustine served in Munich and Frankfurt during the 1950s and 1960s and was posted to Saigon in 1968.

During World War II, Mr. Augustine was part of an elite detachment of linguists, spies and scientists assigned to a mission whose code name was Alsos. The Alsos operation was under the purview of Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the head of the atom-bomb development effort known as the Manhattan Project. Although Alsos is Greek for “grove,” the code name was apparently coincidental.

“Alsos was one of the most successful intelligence operations of the war,” said Robert Norris, author of the 2003 book “Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man.”

Groves suspected German physicists were deep into a similar bomb effort and feared the enemy might finish first because they possessed superior engineers. Among the German scientists were Otto Hahn, the discoverer of the nuclear fission principle, and several Nobel Prize-winning physicists.

In autumn 1943, Groves called for the creation of Alsos to track the Nazis’ progress by finding German scientists and interrogating them.

Mr. Augustine, then serving in the Army Air Forces, emerged as an ideal candidate in the spring of 1944 when military officials were selecting additional members for the operation.

At Northwestern University, Mr. Augustine majored in Latin, minored in German and took two years of ancient Greek. After graduating in 1935, he spent 16 months touring Europe on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that he acquired in Rotterdam.

During an extended stay in Germany, Mr. Augustine attended a Nazi Party rally in Heidelberg that he later described as akin to a “Fourth of July” celebration with scarlet swastika banners and leather-booted storm troopers.

Part of the Alsos mission, said historian Thomas Powers, author of the 1993 book “Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,” was to scour Europe for raw nuclear materials such as uranium ore and keep it out of German hands.

The USA Today Crossword Blog: Saturday, March 12, 2011

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