harry,
i don't think this is about alchemy. the energy and raw materials required to produce valuable elements are far too expensive to make this practical, and no-one knows how to do it. it is possible that die alchemisten are focussed on this, but if so they are no threat to anyone at the moment. that doesn't mean we have nothing to worry about. the patent filed by leo szilard was for a prototype nuclear reactor. szilard is an engineer and physicist, and saw cockroft's claim that the nuclear transmutation reaction could not yield energy "on an engineering scale" as a challenge to be beaten. transmutation occurs when an atom is hit by an energetic neutron, and his idea was to trigger a process using lighter elements that produce a lot of neutrons as well as energy when hit, so that the process is self-sustaining. so far, his attempts to use elements like beryllium and indium have been unsuccessful, but in the last year hahn and strassman succeeded where he failed, using uranium, and it is possible that this could lead to a practical energy generation process. if that is what die alchemisten are working on then we have a much bigger problem. nuclear processes yield a million times more energy for each gram of fuel than the current chemical reactions like burning coal, and if the nazis could harness that then their steel and aluminium production would massively increase giving them a huge advantage in war. we don't know how far they have got with this technology, but i think we should assume that they are ahead of us and try to find out how far.