What steps was Germany taking to create nuclear weapons before 1945, and how close did they get to it?

by LargeLion31
restricteddata

See this section of the FAQ for a number of previous answers; please feel free to ask any follow-up questions. The short answer is that they had a modest reactor research program. They did not have a weapons production program. They did not get anywhere practicably close to having an atomic bomb as a result. (Which is to say, they would have been years away even if they had, near the end of the war, decided to commit to making one, which they never did.) There is a lot of mythology about how the Nazis were narrowly beaten to the bomb by the Allies, but this is not true.