While American troops had the sense that the GFF had something
big planned for Hechingen, the town was in the French occupation
zone, and American officials were loathe to share more specific
information with their "allies". Thus, the GFF successfully
raided the dump, found the radium, and subsequently used it
against the American residency zone. Hechingen was the German
town where Werner Heisenberg lead his country's inital effort to
build an atomic bomb. The pile melted down in 1943 killing
Heisenberg and irradiating much of southwestern Germany.
However, the nuclear material was recovered by Jews and other
prisoners and reassembled in Tubingen, another university town
where Kurt Diebner led a team that successfully completed the
first German atomic bomb.