Later, he reflected on the splintered destiny the move brought about, as he with his wife and daughter Elisabeth said goodbye to the clerical life in Eisenach. Parishioners and friends gathered at the train station with flowers and fond farewells, sadness and love flowing after their thirteen years there. “We did not know how heavy would be the fate that we traveled toward,” he wrote. “Of the three of us, I alone am still alive.”
CHAPTER 2
Loss, Kiel 1931
In Kiel, Emil and Else Fuchs settled into an apartment within an easy walk of his Pedagogical Academy and the university. Else could rest a bit after the years of being a minister’s wife and helping Emil with his congregation. Recovered, Gerhard was there to finish the remaining semesters before taking his law exams. So was Elisabeth, at twenty-three, her training in art almost complete. Klaus would transfer from Leipzig but not until the semester’s end in August.
Kristel was at the Odenwaldschule, the boarding school that Gerhard had attended. Emil had written to Paul Geheeb when the political environment in Eisenach became intolerable for her. Kristel, he told him, was much like Gerhard and had difficulty keeping her opinions to herself. He thought she would flourish under the Geheebs’ tutelage as Gerhard had. Soon after, Kristel traveled to the school, where she did indeed flourish.
The two daughters resembled their mother with thin angular faces, as did Gerhard, but Klaus was his father’s son, an heir to the Fuchs full cheeks. Offset by wire-rim glasses and an increasingly high forehead, the cheeks gave him the look of a boyish intellectual, though with penetrating eyes. In terms of character, father and son appeared to be opposites—Emil energetic and Klaus reserved—but Klaus had his father’s inner toughness. In hard times, they both collected themselves quickly and moved on.
An old and beautiful city on the southwest coast of the Baltic Sea, Kiel had evolved from a Viking colony on a small island in the fjord. At one point a haven for pirates, the island had been connected to the city when fill dirt was dumped into the narrow waterway. Automobiles and trams crossed the cobblestoned Market Square, vibrating the abutting city hall, church, and seventeenth-century houses and shops. Directly to the north was the Schloss, a castle originally part of the city’s defenses.
The role of providing security along the Baltic had passed to Kiel’s Imperial Naval Station, where in November 1918 a mutiny ignited the revolution that spread across the country and sent the kaiser into exile. In the early 1920s, restrictions in the Versailles Treaty all but closed the naval yard, and its garrison of thirty-five thousand men left the city. The vacuum sucked up much of its economic life and replaced it with unemployment and misery that made it fertile ground for radical ideas.
Gerhard Fuchs took little time to survey the political terrain in Kiel before forming a strategy based on the belief that only a united working class could stop Hitler. The communist and socialist clubs at the university, the Revolutionary Student Group and the Socialist Student Union, were moribund. In Leipzig, the SPD and the KPD had been too far apart, but in Kiel, with the university students at least, he saw the opportunity to form a coalition—which he did—the Free Socialist Student Group. The SPD leaders begrudgingly accepted this alignment. What they needed to unite against was becoming increasingly more obvious.
At the end of June, the Kiel Daily News reported on an attack during a lecture to a student club in the university auditorium. While Professor Walther Schücking spoke on the “organization of the World Court,” a young man burst through the door and hurled a canister eight inches long. It bounced off a shoulder, landed on a table, rolled onto the floor, and exploded. Glass shards struck three people, one suffering deep cuts to the legs. An odor permeated the room—tear gas.
The culprit ran out and jumped on his bicycle, but the crowd caught up to him. He was a nineteen-year-old medical student and a member of the National Socialist Student League, that is, a Nazi.
A few days before, at the consecration of a memorial to students killed in World War I, a representative of the Nazi students provoked a less injurious but more telling incident. First, he made remarks approved by the university. At the end, he inserted the salutation “Heil.” A chorus erupted with “Germany, Awaken” and “To Our Future.” Then “Destruction to the Jews” rang out.
When brought before the University Senate, this student explained, “I regret that the idea of our movement finds so little understanding in the circles of professors that this ‘Heil’ has been felt as a provocation and not as a self-evident greeting to our dead.” The senate was unsympathetic and reprimanded him. The university also withdrew its approval of the Nazi student group.
Less obvious was the fact that orchestrating these incidents was a practiced Nazi instigator and propagandist named Reinhard Sunkel. He carefully crafted statements for the press that minimized the offenses and claimed police bias against the Nazis. Three local newspapers always printed them.
Sunkel and his friend Joachim Haupt, hardened from service in a paramilitary group, had come to Kiel in 1926 specifically to infiltrate the student body and undermine the university. Within a couple of years, they had set up a Nazi student club (one of the first), launched a university newspaper with Sunkel as publisher, and connived to get Haupt on the student council. Haupt, a PhD student in philosophy, quickly became a board member and took over the organization, causing other organizations to withdraw in protest. Outside the university, the Nazis had already built up a small regional network in the area that Sunkel and Haupt could rely on.
They left the university and Kiel in the late 1920s—Haupt, with his new PhD, to teach in area institutions, and Sunkel to organize activities at the office for Nazi student groups in Berlin. Sunkel decided to return to Kiel in March 1931 to head the local Nazi Party—coinciding almost perfectly with the Fuchs family’s arrival. In Sunkel, the Fuchs brothers would have a malicious and well-established opponent.
* * *
—
Klaus arrived in August and by the thirty-first had registered at the police station as a Social Democrat. Elisabeth and Gerhard had already done so. By the start of the winter semester on October 1, the two brothers had officially organized their coalition of socialist and communist students and applied to the university for approval of the new Free Socialist Student Group. Gerhard was the public face, and Klaus was the political leader. They were ready to combat Nazi students and their propaganda, with tactics that addressed substantive issues rather than old grievances and wounded national pride. Their first effort was to target the loss of students’ economic rights.
The government funded and controlled the universities, hiring and firing professors (who were consequently government employees) and setting fees, a number of which it had increased for the fall semester. Gerhard requested the university’s permission to lecture on this issue at the Seeburg, the student union, on November 6. An issue important to students, especially those with lower incomes, it avoided a direct attack on the right. Klaus and Gerhard wanted to test the Nazis and see how they would respond to their call for all students to protest. Their flyer began,
The fees are increased!
Protest with us against this university reaction, fight with us for our demands:
Sliding-scale fees according to income!
Scholarships for the working and middle class based on talent!
The full-page leaflet blamed the increases on capitalists whose wealth didn’t support the government because they avoided paying taxes on income from their foreign businesses.
* * *
—
That fall, while Gerhard and Klaus organized, their mother fought a different and even more insidious opponent. Depression had been a recurring problem for her, but now, with the political climate weighing her down, the cloud just wouldn’t lift. In September, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her wedding to Emil gave her a brief respite: the couple took a short trip; the chi
ldren made special gifts for her. But her melancholy was stubborn and deep, and saying goodbye was continually on her mind. “What comes now, I can no longer bear with you,” she told her husband.
On the evening of October 9, Klaus and Gerhard invited their father to hear the well-known sociologist and Social Democratic professor Alfred Meusel speak on the path of nationalism and fascism. Meusel gave a clear and distressing view of what was before them. The next morning Meusel’s words occupied Emil’s mind, and he gave less time to Else.
Elisabeth came running from the kitchen yelling, “Mother is on the floor! She’s not moving.” Doctors came, but they were helpless. Else had drunk hydrochloric acid, and nothing could be done. As the family watched Else die a torturous death, she called out, “Mother! I come!” She had witnessed her mother’s suicide. Else’s was the seventh suicide in a direct family line.
As her own mother’s witness, Elisabeth drew a picture of the deathbed, one that gripped Emil as “powerful and shattering.” The impression etched into Elisabeth was not lost on him.
Emil had immediately written to the Odenwaldschule, telling them that Else was terribly sick and that doctors feared for her weak heart. Kristel was on a school hike, however, and men on motorbikes were sent to search for her. She didn’t arrive in Kiel until the thirteenth, unaware of the tragedy until she arrived.
The family held a quiet funeral for Else in Kiel. The family’s death notice read, “We ask you to refrain from condolences. Even flowers are not in her nature. Whoever wants to commemorate her, befriend those who are in need.”
Emil and the children moved to a new apartment and tried to resume their lives. Meanwhile, Gerhard and Klaus organized the socialist students; Elisabeth continued with her art; Emil taught and closely watched political developments at the Pedagogical Academy; Kristel returned to the Odenwaldschule. Klaus never spoke about his mother’s death. His only acknowledgment was to write on administrative forms, on the line next to “Mother,” “deceased, 10/10/31, age 60, cause: political reasons.”
* * *
—
Gerhard held his lecture on November 6. No protests on the injustice of the fee increases followed. No outcries from other student groups arose. The university educated the children of the civil service and business classes. The working class was only 2.1 percent of the student body. It wasn’t a large enough core group—even with Social Democrats from outside the working class—to galvanize the full, thirty-two-hundred-member student body.
But the Nazi students noticed and responded quickly. With the foundation provided by Sunkel and Haupt, they had largely controlled the political field, but now here were two newcomers, Gerhard and Klaus Fuchs, stirring up students.
In a letter printed in a local right-wing newspaper a week later, the Nazis touted their own demands over the last year for reduced fees and a sliding income scale. At the same time, they launched a bold new effort to recruit Nazi members from Marxist ranks. In Nazi vernacular, “Marxist” was a catchword that swept communists, Social Democrats, and Jews together and branded them as the cause of Germany’s downfall. Gerhard and Klaus were ready to push back with the same belligerence. In their newsletter, Red Students, they declared, “Who has betrayed us? The Nazi fascists.”
Over the next year as fees continued to rise, this pattern—a call to resist the increases, words between the two sides, defamatory rebukes—kept the university community on edge.
The two brothers never backed down. They had watched as their father always passionately spoke his mind and pushed his ideals. He believed, optimistically and doggedly, in the power of each person to change the world, a characteristic not lost on his children. For his own contribution, he co-founded a reform movement for adult education, participated in founding a group called the Religious Socialists, and became a Quaker and preached peace while also maintaining his Lutheran ministry and pricking the conservatism of the Lutheran Church.
The children differed from their father in style, motivation, and temperament but not in their single-mindedness. All four saw a world urgently in need of reform. Their perception of the woes of the working class and the success of the capitalists riding on its back shaped their lives and individual actions. For Klaus, this commitment to the idea of fairness would ultimately contribute to his sharing the West’s nuclear secrets with Soviet Russia.
CHAPTER 3
Revolt, Kiel 1932
The administrators of Kiel’s 250-year-old university strained to check the clash of ideologies, as well as the heightened, sometimes violent, passions of youth from left and right. They issued warnings, stipulated conditions, and called in offenders to threaten reprimands.
These officials were largely middle-aged university professors elected to their governing posts. The fifty-three-year-old rector, August Skalweit, ordinarily a professor of economics, had no experience controlling conflict. Neither he nor most of his colleagues were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, but they were all acutely aware of the precarious political storm ahead of them, as were the rectors at Germany’s several dozen other universities.
Matters came to a head in 1932, when a national election was so disruptive that it caused the student alliances to shift. Klaus later described this moment of realignment as “the decision that determined my whole life.” It “created my whole future.”
The seven-year term of Paul von Hindenburg as president of the Weimar Republic was coming to an end. The old general (a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War!) had been called out of retirement in 1914 to lead the German army. It was he who, when summoned to appear before a parliamentary commission to explain Germany’s loss, refused to admit being bested on the battlefield and offered up instead the myth of the “stab in the back” by liberals on the home front. In 1925, he had been persuaded to come out of retirement for a second time to run for president.
In 1932, Hindenburg’s opponents would include Adolf Hitler and Ernst Thälmann, head of the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, who very much had become chair with the support of Joseph Stalin. The more moderately “left” SPD, the largest party, feared splitting the antifascist vote and allowing Hitler’s election, and as a result decided not to run its own candidate, instead supporting Hindenburg.
But the KPD leadership made a much more Machiavellian calculation. Watching from Moscow as Hitler gained influence, Stalin and his Politburo saw an opportunity. If Hitler should come to power, they reasoned, he would never be able to sustain it, and when he faltered, the old order of the capitalists and the Social Democrats would collapse, opening the door for a Marxist-Leninist revolution in Germany.
This was the same all-or-nothing approach that the communists had relied on to seize power in Russia in 1918. When the German party leader Thälmann declaimed, “Socialists and fascists are twins,” the Social Democrats hurled back, “Bolsheviks and fascists are brothers.” The Social Democrats were closer to the truth, but the Fuchses were oblivious to the conniving of the Politburo.
For Klaus and Gerhard Fuchs, Hindenburg symbolized the very capitalist elite they railed against every day as they fought for the rights and the future of working-class students. In their minds, the SPD had acquiesced to the “bourgeois parties” and sold out, when a united working class was the only victorious counterforce to fascism.
The Fuchs brothers gave their support to Thälmann, becoming surrogate speakers for him in Kiel. Within a few weeks, the SPD banned their student members from participating in the Free Socialist Student Group at the university. The KPD happily took in the Fuchs brothers, as well as their sister Elisabeth.
At first, Klaus was ambivalent, but not because the communists called for revolution and demanded allegiance to the Soviet Union. It was memories of the conflict of loyalties he had witnessed in Leipzig when the communists and the Social Democrats agreed on a united front to support worker rights, and then the communists attacked the SPD.
Emil didn
’t follow them. At the war’s end, having added the Quaker pacifist beliefs to his ministry in the Lutheran Church, he rejected the revolutionary cries of the communists. Although he respected his children’s choice, it made him both uneasy and prophetic as he wrote to Paul Geheeb, his friend at the Odenwaldschule, “They are all—each in his own way—very one-sided and they are unbending in their character. They will not have it easy in life.”
* * *
—
The election was a major event in Kiel, with politically sponsored speakers, musical entertainment, and film evenings from all parties drawing large crowds and predictable violence between the Nazis and the communists or Reichsbanner or both. Street fighting increased, and police remained on standby to intercede. In communist neighborhoods, the Nazis constantly pushed for a foothold as local Hitler Youth and the Sturmabteilung, or SA, marched through to rile up residents, start fights, and lure the young men with their displays of power. Somewhere during this time Klaus, the studious math prodigy, lost three front teeth, most likely in a brawl.
In an effort to keep the peace, the university banned political activities until after the elections. But Klaus transferred to the local youth KPD chapter, several hundred members strong, and took up leadership of the Red Spark, an agitprop troupe. Agitation and political theater—part entertainment, part hard-core political propaganda as typified by the plays of Bertolt Brecht—had been used successfully by the Bolsheviks during their 1917 revolution.
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