...in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The Germans didn't know at the time their carbon was contaminated with boron, so mistakenly came to the conclusion that carbon couldn't be used as a moderator at all, and yes, the British bombed the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant in Norway and sank the last ferry out at our behest to deny them that approach. So they didn't "almost" build a reactor; they built a test article that never came close to sustaining a reaction, and they didn't have the resources to build an expanded version. It didn't help that they had chased away many of their best physicists for the crime of being Jewish. They did have a fair stockpile of uranium on hand which ended up being processed through US production plants to make plutonium after we captured it.
You will also sometimes hear such "almost had a reactor/bomb" claims about the Japanese, but while they had a couple of people who were aware of the possibility of atomic energy their feeble efforts in that direction were even more laughable and hopeless than the Germans'.
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