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While I believe that these cubes ended up in someone’s reactor, I note that there have been enough radioactive materials recycled into the iron stock of the world that I now check every piece of stock I get for emissions, and have had to return a couple of orders due to detectable levels of radiation. Since some of the things I make are used for food service, I find anything above background to be unacceptable – I use a very sensitive detector, and the worst piece of steel, a bit of recycled truck spring, was about as radioactive as a banana (all that potassium, you know). It wouldn’t surprise me if someone had seen “lots of metal cubes” and just tossed them into a crucible with a few tons of other random scrap.
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2710 Liberty ships built, about 1500 taken out of service before the end of the war for structural failure, 200 sunk in action, and 3 of them simply broke in half on the open sea. Basically, the U.S. built more targets than the Nazis could handle, but by no means were they a shining example of the American Industry,
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Given the location of Gottow I’d assume that most of the missing cubes ended up in some lab or other in the Soviet Union.
It is however possible that at least some of the cubes from Gottow were evacuated to Prague. Where they could have been captured by American or Soviet forces.
The bulk of the uranium itself would have been mined in or around the Jáchymov area.
Additional uranium was looted from laboratories in occupied Europe.
The whole thing is extremely murky. Everything was very secret, on all sides, both at the time and for decades later. Everybody who had any first hand knowledge is dead. Some documents are still classified, and a lot is simply buried in the archives, waiting for someone to realize their significance. (It’s amazing what can be reconstructed from “boring” accounting files when you can read them. And know what you’re looking for.) Surviving records like interrogation protocols hardly tell exactly what actually happens and have translation/transcription errors.
There are all kinds of stories, even that there was a third research group, set up by Kammler, which got further than the other groups.
The whole has everything to keep the conspiracy nuts happy for decades, but there is also a lot of material for historians to look into and write their doctoral thesis about.
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One of my favorite stories from WW2 is one of first tasks when we got into France was to collect wine from various vintages in up to an including 1944 because if there had been any uranium production in Germany, there would be inevitably trace amounts of uranium in the soils and, therefore, in the wine. So some OSS guys were dispatched to do that and shipped to the team in England, but due to bad communication, the wrong department got the wine, so they just drank it. And the OSS guys had to go back and do it again. With the samples, though, the US/UK programs were then convinced the Germans did not produce refine uranium in any amounts at all.
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As Stalin apparently put it, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
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If someone is collecting them, I hope they take precautions, and don’t just stack them.
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That is a super critical comment!
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I believe that Canada supplied a large proportion of the trucks used throughout the Empire. The British and Indian armies rode around in CMP (Canadian Military Pattern) trucks for the most part.
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Under the media center where my vacuum doesn’t reach
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I would presume much of it ended up in US and Soviet hands and was used up decades ago in their arsenals
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The missing uranium is probably in some US missiles - or that warehouse from Indiana Jones.
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Just in case I checked my junk drawer: Not there.
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I always like to check one more place after I’ve found something, just so I can tell people it was in the second-to-last place I looked.
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It also helps that they never figured out how to use graphite as a neutron moderator, and the allies were able to sabatoge their ability to make heavy water, so even if they’d had a program it would have been hard to keep it going.
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The German reactor programme was literally sunk when the last of the heavy water refined at Vemork was lost in the 1943 sinking of SF Hydro by impossibly-brave Norwegian commandoes.
The Germans had looked at natural uranium and graphite reactors but Walther Bothe calculated a far too high neutron absorption for graphite - probably due to boron contamination so that was abandoned. And they didn’t have the resources to develop industrial scale enrichment needed for a light water reactor.
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'The Nazis didn’t have the industrial base by that point in the war to enrich uranium into fissile material in the quantities needed. ’
This is a huge point. The UK’s quaintly-named MAUD Committee had worked out the fundamentals of building a bomb - including how to perform gas diffusion and electromagnetic isotope separation on an industrial scale - as early as 1941; but the commitment of time, expertise and money was impossible especially for a country well within reach of German bombers. There were proposals to do the work in Canada, but the entry of the US into the war meant that what had then become the Tube Alloys Project was gradually folded into the Manhattan Project.
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On the contrary, I’d call it extremely emblematic of American Industry. 
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