Yes, and don’t forget that we sank a ferry carrying heavy water to the German installation that probably enabled us to develop the bomb first. Actually we could not have done it without the help of German engineers... We came within a whisker of being on the receiving end of the bomb.
True. However, and only in retrospect, the German bomb program was revealed after the war to be sub-primitive, almost laughable. In no way do I imply that it was anything to joke about at the time; after all, fission had been discovered (more properly stated, the mystery had been unlocked) in Germany, and Germany had by far the world's most advanced chemical industry pre-war. Germany had the largest assemblage of theoretical physicists capable of studying nuclear dynamics at the time. So Germany was in no way to be taken lightly in terms of technological advancement, no way. They were no more than 1-2% down the road towards buiding a nuke, having built only a very crude and AFAIK totally non-functional "reactor".
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p11.htm
From a "Nova" program on "the Nazi Bomb" (not sure if that is the correct title)
"The Germans would have needed a total of about five tons of heavy water to get a heavy water reactor, nuclear reactor, running. The list here informs us, essentially, that about half a ton of heavy water was being transported to Germany. The Hydro the ferry you referred to was carrying far too little heavy water for even one reactor, let alone the 10 or more that would have been needed to make enough plutonium for a nuclear weapon."
"For months, Alsos scoured newly-liberated Europe and found nothing. Then, just days before the final German surrender, they came to Haigerloch, a small town in Bavaria. Beneath a church there was a cave, and inside they found the intended destination of the Norwegian heavy water: a makeshift laboratory with a single experimental reactor that German scientists still had not gotten to work.
The Nazi nuclear bomb, which had inspired so much fear, turned out to be a mirage. There was no German equivalent of the vast Manhattan Project."
As to why the German's didn't have a extensive effort to build a bomb the show offers this.
" Now, in America it was assumed that the war was going to take a long time: "These weapons will be done before the end of the war, therefore we have to try to make them." In Germany it was assumed that: "If we don't win the war quickly, we will lose; these weapons might be interesting for the future, but they're no help to us now. It would be a waste of energy, money, and time to try to make them."