An atomic bomb in Adolf Hitler's hands was the nightmare that drove scientists at Hanford during World War II.

"From January 1939, until American troops finally entered Germany and we took into custody a number of senior German scientists, we faced the definite possibility that Germany could produce a nuclear weapon before we could," said Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the wartime head of the entire atomic program, the Manhattan Project.

However, as the surrender neared in 1945, Allied intelligence found Germany's efforts were rather primitive compared with those in the United States.

But no one knew that in 1944, when it was crunch time at home to build the bomb.

Groves discussed that time -and the fear of the German bomb - in his book, Now It Can Be Told.

The Manhattan Project had its own intelligence division that worked closely with Army G-2 intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

"We had to learn as soon as we could what the Germans might be able to do if they exerted every possible effort to produce an atomic weapon.

"Throughout the project, there was universal respect for the quality of German science," Groves said.

Werner Heisenberg, a German scientist, was considered one of the world's leading physicists and Frederic Joliot-Curie, another leading European scientist under German control, was a Nobel prize winner.

"Our scientific people were acutely conscious that European scientists had discovered the principle of fission and that our enemies were continually harping on their proposed use of secret weapons.

"Although this was hard on our nerves, it did keep us from ever becoming overconfident of the superiority of American-British efforts in the field of nuclear physics.

"Unless we had positive knowledge to the contrary, we had to assume that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government and with the full capacity of the German industry at their disposal. Any other assumption would have been unsound and dangerous," wrote Groves.

Richard Rhodes in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb tells how Albert Speer, the head of Germany's munitions effort, had several talks with Heisenberg. He then briefed Hitler on the bomb's progress.

"Professor Heisenberger had not given any final answer to my question of whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control and Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the Earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star," Speer wrote.

Hitler thought the bomb was a good idea, but he would not live to see it developed. Soon after, "on the suggestion of the nuclear physicist we scuttled the project to develop an atomic bomb," Speer wrote.

But Groves and the U.S. team did not know this at the time. They continued their frantic efforts to learn just how close the Germans were to building a bomb.

The thought haunted some Manhattan Project scientists.

There was talk of the Germans using an atomic bomb in England and the United States. One rumor held that Germany might lay down some type of radioactive material to thwart the invading Allied armies that stormed ashore on D-Day.

It made little difference that their own work showed how difficult it was to create an atomic bomb.

"Our chief danger was that they might come up with a relatively simple solution to the problems we were finding so difficult," Groves wrote.

The United States feared little that the Japanese had the manpower, scientific knowledge or raw material to produce a bomb, he wrote.

Part of the task was to find a way to spy on Germany to keep abreast of its atomic bomb efforts.

The United States knew the Germans had acquired a huge electric works in Norway in 1940 to produce heavy water, which could be used to make an atomic bomb.

Groves and others suggested to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower that these Norway plants be bombed or sabotaged.

The plot to put these factories out of commission involved an operation that could have been dreamed up in Hollywood. Norwegian guerrillas, trained in sabotage in Britain and wearing British uniforms, parachuted into Norway.

After a week of cross-country skiing, they arrived at the site and blew it up Feb. 26, 1943.

Swedish newspapers called it one of the most successful sabotage efforts of the war.

But the possibility existed -however slight - that the Germans would try something similar.

Groves was paranoid when it came to newspaper reports that hinted anything about the atom.

Attempts were made to tell the U.S. press that what the German's were doing with heavy water was merely a biological experiment "and in no way connected with explosives."

As the Allies worked their way up the boot of Italy, Groves' own intelligence group - code named "Alsos" - started quizzing captured Italian scientists about what they knew of Germany's nuclear capabilities. (Groves almost came unglued when he learned that Alsos in Greek means "grove," but the name stuck, regardless of the possible breach of security.)

Alsos agents came ashore at Normandy and were sometimes ahead of the advancing Army marching into Germany.

Its main task was to find and question leading German scientists.

Alsos found early on that most of the German scientific effort was concentrated on the "V' weapons, rockets that carried conventional weapons into the heart of Britain.

The agents kept hearing Germans had made very little progress on uranium and were not remotely close to an atomic bomb.

But Groves wanted more proof than hearsay.

A big scare occurred in the autumn of 1944. Aerial reconnaissance discovered massive efforts at a huge factory near Bisingen.

Was this the long-sought German atomic effort?

A few days later a British mining expert recognized the complex as nothing more than a new form of a shale-oil cracking plant that could produce badly needed fuel for the German war machine.

In March 1945, Alsos investigators were in Heidelberg to question scientists at the famous University of Heidelberg. Germany's experts said using uranium as an explosive was impossible.

Finally, in the small town of Tailfinger, the Alsos agents found the main German atomic science lab but none of its papers.

That mystery was soon solved when a drum deposited in a cesspool in the back yard of the house of a leading nuclear scientist, C.F. Von Weizsacker, was dredged up and the final chapter of German's atomic effort came to a close.

A cesspool burial was a fitting end to the German atomic bomb effort.