[spectre]

"If I'm not mistaken, the Germans were pretty close to developing an atomic weapon."

They were no way near close. We did not really know that until the war ended when we then captured their scientists and research data.

The Germans never got past the research stage, unable to attain a chain reaction.

They actually gave up experimention in early 1944 when their Berlin research lab was bombed.

[Petronski]

Additionally, Hitler and his top advisors regarded nuclear physics as some kind of gutter Hebrew voodoo science. I kid you not (I wish I had the cite).

[Fred Hayek]

"The Germans never got past the research stage, unable to attain a chain reaction."

I think what happened was a decimal point slipped in the calculations after some nuetron cross section tests. Thus they missed the boat. Otherwise they might have tried a graphite moderator just like Chicago Pile 1.

[wingnuts'nbolts]

Herr Hitler exterminated and chased out all the intellectual genius in Germany, rendering himself redundant in the very fields in which he needed to excell. The Manhattan project had not just a few of them on the team.