A few days later, Rector Skalweit dismissed Essmann’s complaint on the grounds that Klaus was not “conscious” that his charge against Essmann was misleading.
Throughout the fights, meetings, and letter writing, Klaus continued his studies. A favorite professor, Abraham Fraenkel, who by the 1930s was a recognized expert on set theory, gave Klaus a strong base in logic and mathematical foundations. January 1933, appearing relatively calm, afforded opportunity for quiet scholarship. But this was to end.
Toward the end of the month, Rector Skalweit felt “a certain agitation within the student body.” He saw it in the halls of the college buildings, with frequent stink bombs set off, and in the groups standing around. The students were generally edgy. Newspaper accounts of Papen’s push to appoint Hitler as chancellor—the conservatives in the government were sure they could control him—excited those who hungered for the Nazis’ vision of a new Germany and roiled the jittery nerves of everyone else.
In the meantime, Klaus continued the Tuesday night meetings in the Seeburg with such topics as “The National Question.” The new rules required an admission ticket indicating the student’s membership in the sponsoring club and a check on a list at the door. A guard, paid three reichsmarks by the university, stood on watch. No new protests or flyers appeared.
* * *
—
On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg doomed the Weimar Republic, as well as the millions of people who would die in the years of war and mass extermination to follow. He granted Papen’s appeals and appointed Hitler chancellor.
On a cold, wintry night three days later, thousands of Kiel’s citizens lined the streets for a torchlit victory parade led by hordes of brown-shirted men. For as far as one could see, they wound down Holstenstrasse into the old market square. Flames from the torches cast eerie shadows on the city hall, footsteps spiked the cobblestones echoing into the night, and the crowds cheered wildly and sang. Klaus presumably stayed away. It wasn’t a safe place for a recognized communist.
On February 4, with President Hindenburg’s approval, Hitler issued a decree that banned meetings and publications considered a public threat. It had swift ramifications for the state of Prussia, because at the same time Hermann Göring became Prussian minister of the interior, which gave him direct control of the police. The Preussenschlag, when Papen took over the state’s government the previous summer, made this transition swift and efficient.
Göring quickly mobilized. He and Hitler had an urgent goal: to eradicate the only real organized opposition to a Nazi takeover, namely the communists. Within a few days, he had ordered the Prussian police, in collaboration with paramilitary groups, to suppress political meetings and marches and to fire on demonstrators at will. Then he created an auxiliary police force thousands strong drawn mainly from the ranks of the Sturmabteilung, primarily young and hefty thugs. Armed with pistols, rifles, and rubber truncheons, they were lawless police, beating and arresting anyone who criticized the Nazis.
Kiel’s chief of police, Otto Graf zu Rantzau, soon became chief of the local Gestapo there, launching eviscerating raids on the communists in and around Kiel. For the time being he didn’t bother students at the university.
It took the Nazi students five days after Hitler’s ascent to petition Rector Skalweit. Some of their demands seemed trivial to Klaus next to the chaos in the country. Two alarmed him: recognition of the Nazi-backed student council as the representative of the student body and prohibition of Klaus’s socialist club. As the Nazis well knew, the rector didn’t have authority over these decisions. Part of their intent was to box him in.
The government then scheduled yet another round of elections for the Reichstag in March 1933. On Monday, February 6, consistent with university policy, the rector closed the Seeburg to all political events. In a tense meeting, the Nazis met with him to question the policy. Afterward, they hurried to the newspapers to give a grossly distorted version of the discussion that the newspapers printed. The chain of events led to the University Senate’s sanctioning the rector. Emboldened, the Nazis incited a student demonstration against him.
On Friday afternoon, Nazi student leaders gathered a crowd in front of the main university building. They called for a two-day strike and hurled insults at university officials while their classmates, agitated and angry, swarmed and cheered. A mob of storm troopers marched from the city center as Klaus and other socialist students surged against them. A riot broke out. Stink bombs flew through the air, fire hydrants spewed, and flyers inciting hatred littered the ground. Seizing the moment, the storm troopers jumped on Klaus and beat him. The Nazi crowd yelled, “Throw him in the fjord!” They were out for blood. Police stood by and watched as they threw him into the icy waters of Kiel’s fjord, leaving him for dead. Miraculously, he survived, and when the crowd had gone, he swam to safety.
The rector shut down the university for three days. A crowd gathered in front of the university the next day, and again a riot broke out. Police quickly quelled it.
The Nazis’ calls for a strike and their insults to the rector aggravated a large segment of students. Their vocal opposition forced the Nazis to cancel the strike and ask for mediation with the rector. The newspapers, complicit with the Nazi students, persisted in goading Skalweit.
In a move not reported by the newspapers, on the following Monday the socialist students filled the void left by the canceled Nazi protest with their own illegal demonstration. According to Klaus, it was disciplined and impressive. “We knew, however,” he later remarked, “that these were the last victories before a retreat.”
During the riot, the police had stood about and passively watched the SA’s almost deadly attack on Klaus, and he complained to the rector about their neglect. Resigned to the situation, the rector in his answer made it clear that he could barely defend himself let alone defiant students.
Shortly after, Gerhard, in Kiel on a visit from Berlin, found out that the Nazi student leadership had sentenced Klaus to death. Klaus and Elisabeth went into hiding. Gerhard headed for Berlin.
The direction of the country was clear, as was the fate of the communists. The February 9 edition of the Kieler Zeitung quoted Hitler as saying, “In ten years, no more communists in Germany!” But the Nazis weren’t content to wait that long.
* * *
—
The morning of February 28 was dreary and stormy in Kiel. As Emil walked to his office, he saw people ignoring the rain and crowding around the cylindrical advertising columns on Holtenauer Strasse. Curious, he stopped to read the banner headlines. The night before, exactly four weeks after Hitler assumed power, the Reichstag had burned to the ground.
The Nazis, with almost complete control of the press, wasted no time blaming the communists and raising fears of a communist reign of terror. A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was implicated—convicted and executed—but he said he’d acted alone. Later information strongly suggested that the Nazis had set the bonfire themselves—or at least fanned the flames—as a “false flag” operation to justify a crackdown. According to Reuters, “Even anti-communist journals in France are skeptical of the Nazis’ claims.” More than seventy years later, the German government would give Van der Lubbe a posthumous pardon.
President Hindenburg was a sick and addled bystander, easily coerced by Chancellor Hitler to suspend all civil liberties in light of the crisis. The government justified the partial suspension of the constitution “as a defensive measure against communist acts of violence that endanger the state.”
With no delay, the police, the nascent Gestapo, and the storm troopers spread out to neutralize opposition. The sinister thud of black boots falling on wooden stairs resonated in apartment buildings across Germany. Lists methodically drawn up over previous months made the kidnapping, torturing, and slaughtering of communists, Jews, and Social Democrats a matter of routine. The number one student on the list in Kiel was Kl
aus Fuchs.
At four o’clock on the fateful morning of the twenty-eighth, Klaus had caught the train to Berlin. The fact that he had slipped away just in time was purely by chance. As head of the socialist students, he had been called to a general meeting of representatives. Only in transit, when reading the newspaper, did he learn about the Reichstag fire. He coolly removed the small symbol of unity, the hammer and sickle party pin on his lapel, and dropped it in his pocket.
The next day, his girlfriend Lisa went to see Emil and help him figure out what to do. In mid-morning, a knock on the door interrupted them. The police entered and demanded that Emil tell them where Klaus was. Emil, understandably nervous, asked, “Why are you searching for him here? He’s at his girlfriend’s.” The police knew that wasn’t true. They told him that they had already checked there. What they didn’t realize was that the young woman standing in front of them was that girlfriend. When they finally identified her, they demanded to know why she had not stated her name. Lisa met their anger with her usual sass: “How come? You didn’t ask me.” Fortunately, she was dealing with the local police, not the Gestapo.
The authorities searched the apartment and, finding no Klaus and no guns, settled for Emil’s collection of books by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, throwing them into a cart to haul away. Inexplicably, they showed no interest in the duplicating equipment sitting in Klaus’s bedroom nor the fresh supply of propaganda flyers piled next to it. They overlooked the tiled heating stove too. It was stuffed with the files of the Free Socialist Student Group. At some point, someone had tried to burn them; their mass had suffocated the fire. The papers sat there, cold and intact. A few pages lingered in a corner of the room. Emil and Lisa systematically burned each sheet, fearful of a repeat search. Then, in vain, they made a list of Emil’s remaining books.
Sometime later at the police station, Emil asked why they had searched his apartment. “It concerns your son Klaus,” the officer told him. “We must have him. Where is he?”
* * *
—
Emil stayed in Kiel in his position at the academy and continued his pacifist resistance, courageously speaking at the funeral of a Reichsbanner member killed by the SS. Even though about half of the students at the academy were Nazis, they didn’t boycott his classes as they did other socialist or Jewish professors. But the mood was shifting.
On March 4, 1933, the university swore in a new rector. It was a sober, almost funereal affair, the invitation to the faculty instructing, “Please wear dark suits.”
On orders from the Prussian minister of education, the newly elected senate members reinstated the Nazi students who had been expelled or reprimanded in past years. The former rector Skalweit was posted to the University of Frankfurt at the end of the year. Professor Walther Schücking, the lecturer disrupted in 1931 by the tear gas bomb, was dismissed in November. In full circle, the newest rector, Karl Wolf, reported on these changes to Joachim Haupt. The same student who had come to Kiel in 1926 to Nazify the university was now deputy to the new minister of education in Berlin. Klaus’s favorite math teacher, Professor Abraham Fraenkel, voluntarily resigned his position and left the university at the same time as Klaus in late February. He went to Israel, becoming a professor at Tel Aviv University, where he was recognized as a father of modern logic.
With the new regime firmly in command, the Nazi students proposed another list of four requests, this one respectfully submitted and with a new focus. Prior to March, the Nazi students had largely attacked the communists. Now it was the Jews. They argued that Jewish professors didn’t understand Germany and German thought and that foreign Jews and communists would circulate antinationalist propaganda everywhere they settled. The four requests were (1) to enroll no new Jews; (2) to reduce the percentage of Jews enrolled to that corresponding to the German population [0.78 percent or a quota of twenty-seven Jewish students at Kiel]; (3) to carry out the same type of reduction in the teaching staff; and (4) to assure that all academic examinations have a German and objective composition.
Over time the students and administration ensured that the rest of the subhumanity, as Hitler had called them, was cleaned out.
Ironically, Kiel’s first Nazi provocateurs, Reinhard Sunkel and Joachim Haupt, had their own subhuman connection. Like Haupt, Sunkel became an assistant in the Prussian Ministry of Education. But when his Jewish great-grandmother was uncovered, he was expelled from the party. Haupt, besides working for Minister Bernhard Rust, became a Sturmbannführer in the SA and was close to its leader, Ernst Röhm. In 1934, when power struggles with the SS and the army led to the infamous “Night of the Long Knives,” in which most of the SA leadership was brutally murdered, Haupt was spared the bloodbath because of a dental appointment. He was later discovered to be homosexual, imprisoned, then released, but expelled from the party. Eventually, he became a farmer. Sunkel committed suicide.
As for Kiel, which became a main U-boat base, Allied bombers—USAF B-17s and RAF Mosquitos—later laid it to waste.
* * *
—
Shortly before Klaus decamped to Berlin, Emil wrote to Paul Geheeb at the Odenwaldschule, where Kristel had returned. What “lay ahead” had arrived, and he was in a pensive mood. “All my children have the complete truthfulness and consequence of my wife and the passion of my commitment,” he wrote. “But I hope that because they are beyond the most difficult period of their development, they can accomplish a great deal of good.”
Except for Kristel, they cautiously made their way in the underground—Elisabeth in Kiel and Klaus and Gerhard in Berlin.
CHAPTER 5
Underground, Berlin 1933
When Klaus Fuchs stepped down from the train at Berlin’s main station on the morning of February 28, a transformed city awaited him. About a mile from where he stood, the ashes from the Reichstag fire still smoldered. Hitler promised that a new Germany would rise like the phoenix from the steaming rubble, a proud nation with a resurgence of the wealth, power, and purity of the Volk—and with no communists or Jews.
Hindenburg’s decree in response to the Reichstag fire had eradicated freedoms of opinion, of the press, of assembly and association; it erased rights to private communications through mail, telephone, or telegraph; it eliminated protections at home. House searches, confiscations, and arrests raged through the city. Police with German shepherds—eyes hungry, ears pricked, fangs temporarily muzzled—patrolled the streets.
German newspapers offered little real news; the government had muzzled the foreign press as well. Göring proudly boasted of the thousands jailed in the days after the fire, but under pain of expulsion no foreign reporter could describe their treatment or anything else that might be “malicious.” Even those tortured in prison and released maintained silence. Otherwise, they as well as their families were promised further torture.
The new decree had ruled all communist meetings illegal; a week later, the party itself was banned. Despite this menace, Klaus made it to the now secret meeting of socialist students, where the leaders praised him for his work in Kiel. Afterward, they schooled him and the others on the new rules of underground resistance: small groups, oral messages, code names, and no lists. Don’t write anything down, and don’t sleep at home. Don’t look back to check on being followed. Maybe wear a disguise. Inauspicious rules for a suddenly uncertain life, many of which the young resisters ignored until it was too late. But nothing could prepare them for the onslaught of brutality.
On February 24, days before the Reichstag fire, the SA had stormed KPD headquarters at the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus in downtown Berlin. The Nazi-controlled press assailed the building as a web of treachery and treason being readied for an imminent communist revolution. After the seizure, a large red flag with a black and bold swastika on a circle of white fluttered from the roof of the massive five-story building. It was repurposed as headquarters of the political section of the Berlin Police and renam
ed the Horst-Wessel-Haus, after the SA leader murdered by the KPD in 1930 and turned into a Nazi martyr by Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Its basement, once described as a labyrinth of communist intrigue, became a detention and torture facility for Jews and dissidents.
At this point MI5 entered, when Captain Guy Liddell, one of its officers in Soviet counterespionage, arrived. But this was Neville Chamberlain’s England that Liddell represented, a country whose royals and upper classes had strong family, social, and business ties with Germany and who were then arguably more concerned about communists than about fascists.
Liddell, who spoke fluent German and knew the country well—as a youth, he had been a promising cellist and studied there—was in Berlin not to investigate abuses by the SA but to explore the left-wing documents they had seized. He toured the building and heard from a Nazi official that none of the stories in the press about it were true. There were no underground passages. The “secret” trapdoors and staircases were in plain sight and used for office mobility.
During Liddell’s ten-day stay, a who’s who of Nazi officialdom welcomed him: Putzi Hanfstaengl, foreign press liaison; Rudolf Diels, chief of the political section of the Berlin Police (soon, the first Gestapo chief); and Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign policy adviser (later minister of foreign affairs). Liddell reported back to London, “Those in authority are persuaded that they have saved Europe from the menace of Communism. They are proud of what they have done, and anxious to convince the outside world that their action was fully justified.”
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