[benzofuran]

This is some more fancy fishing out of a filmmaker - as Animats has indicated, the Nazi's had no serious atomic bomb program - their leading physicists hadn't worked out 'fast fission' and had no workable design for a bomb.

The logistics involved with Uranium separation on an industrial scale simply were impossible during the second half of WW2 for the Nazis - they did not have the materials or the expertise to construct enrichment / separation plants.

The theory nor materials were there to produce a Plutonium device either - no critical pile of any significant size was made, and as far as I know the understanding that a much smaller critical mass of Plutonium was needed was missed entirely as well.

The Nazi bomb program is a great example of the effects of a Scientific embargo - all of the powers at be at WW2 knew the US and UK were up to something involving radiation as most of the leading scientists in the field stopped publishing in the late 1930's until the conclusion of the war.

An interesting read on the subject is Heisenberg's War - http://www.amazon.com/Heisenbergs-War-Secret-History-German/...

[spacefight]

They might not have had a serious A-bomb program, but they sure had lots of interesting scientific researchers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

"By 1947 this evacuation operation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family members. Those with special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers, such as one code-named DUSTBIN,[16] to be held and interrogated, in some cases for months."

[benzofuran]

They definitely had a huge number of interesting researchers - however the support, lack of collaboration, and decentralization of those researchers prevented them from making significant headway in the understanding of nuclear fission and related processes.

[ChuckMcM]

Well one thing is true, nuclear piles leave behind marks of their operation, some with half-lives measured in centuries. So if they did have a program and it was buried under Austria somewhere, then it could be easily 'proven' or not by the presence of those elements. It could kill an ill prepared film crew or exploratory group if they weren't equipped to detect and avoid nuclear hot spots.