Mission: Alsos

The Emilio Segrè Visual Archives is thrilled to announce a recent donation. This new acquisition consists of photos and letters of Sergeant Malcolm Thurgood, who was assigned to the Alsos Mission as a documentary photographer. The mission was an effort by US intelligence personnel to discover Germany’s scientific developments during WWII, focusing on their nuclear weapons project. U.S. Army Colonel Boris Pash, a former Manhattan Project security officer, was the military commander, and Samuel Goudsmit was the scientific head. (The Goudsmit Papers are held by the Niels Bohr Library & Archives and are available online .)

During the Mission, most of the senior German research personnel were taken into custody, including Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg. The Thurgood photos document Malcolm Thurgood’s travels across Europe during the mission, which included experiences such as unearthing buried caches of uranium, working with physicist Samuel Goudsmit, and capturing photos of Europe at the beginning of the post WWII era.

While we begin to archive and digitize the Thurgood photos and letters for long term preservation and research, we wanted to share just a few of the many images we’ve seen so far.

Please enjoy Sergeant Thurgood’s photos from the Alsos Mission. Check back over the next few months to see all 200 images of the collection online. To see more images like the ones we’ve selected type the name “Alsos” in the search engine.