MI5 considered the SCR a communist front, although some of its officers thought it “mild” in that it offered a discussion on both sides and was cultural in nature, not political. It exemplified the successful style of the maestro of propaganda Willi Münzenberg (a probable acquaintance of Klaus’s in Paris), the nondoctrinaire sort that created the desire among left-leaning British, such as Nevill Mott, to travel to Russia.
* * *
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In 1934, Nevill Mott and his wife made the journey, as guests at the Mendeleev Congress in Leningrad. A few years earlier, friends had developed a “gloomy impression” of the Soviet experiment owing to the bad harvests and the problematic five-year economic plan that had caused severe deprivations. But now the Motts saw eager and healthy-looking workers with clothes that were neat and clean, goods available in shops, new paint on the palaces, even better roads. There was every evidence of a good, decent life, and apparently without unemployment—a radical improvement over tsarist days or the chaos and dislocation that had prevailed since the revolution. When Mott asked people about the standard of living, especially the cheaply built housing for workers coming to the new factories, they expressed little concern about the shoddy construction. They all seemed committed to the larger goal, which was “building the Soviet State.”
But Mott also knew that the new Russia displayed to him was hardly a “worker’s paradise.” He asked a guide about kulaks, the prosperous, landowning peasants persecuted for their resistance to collectivization. He wanted to know how many had been banished, and he was told, “Half a million and that wasn’t many was it.” Mott was impressed that this man didn’t cover up the facts. As he later wrote, the guide “wanted to believe in it.” In truth, millions were exiled to Siberia, with thousands simply shot in their villages.
In Leningrad, Mott also saw the physicist Rudi Peierls and his wife, Genia, who lived in a nice, new apartment. It had a beautiful bathroom, but water only in the evenings.
Disagreement over just how much the Soviet reality matched socialist ideals—and how much Stalin’s effort to “build the Soviet State” was an authoritarian betrayal of those ideals—would animate debates among left-wing sympathizers in the West for decades to come. But nonideological progress in physics continued.
* * *
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By the fall of 1936, only three years after his arrival in Britain, Klaus had finished his undergraduate degree, received approval to do a PhD, and submitted his dissertation, titled “A Quantum Mechanical Investigation of the Cohesive Forces of Copper, the Elastic Constants, and the Specific Heat of Monovalent Metals.” The award of the degree was just a few months away. He had also published three articles in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in addition to his groundbreaking article on electrical conductivity.
Also in 1936, in August, Kristel arrived on her way to Swarthmore, the Quaker college in Pennsylvania where a friend of her father’s had arranged a scholarship. She brought Klaus another update on the family, and again it was not good.
* * *
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It began with Karin, who had returned to Berlin, married Gerhard, and become an underground recruiter, code-named Johanna, in Gerhard’s student network. In 1935, the Gestapo penetrated the cell, arrested her, and let her suffer for months behind bars without a specific charge. She was pregnant, and very sick throughout her term, eventually giving birth to her son Jürgen in prison. Quakers in London tried to get her out, but couldn’t.
According to the Gestapo report, they arrested Gerhard as well but for some reason released him. Soon after, as he walked down the street, a friend coming toward him signaled that the Gestapo were behind him. Gerhard escaped them, Guschi drove him to Dresden, and he made it over the Czech border. He was now penniless and soon became desperately ill with TB, ending up in a sanatorium. With Gestapo agents in Czechoslovakia stalking émigrés and kidnapping them, communicating with him directly was dangerous, so Emil used back channels to send him funds, selling subscriptions to his interpretation of the Bible in Switzerland and smuggling in copies. The money went into a Swiss fund for Gerhard. Emil knew that if caught, he would be charged with high treason.
Guschi, now Elisabeth’s husband, had been arrested in mid-January 1936. The Gestapo probably would have arrested Elisabeth too, but she was in the hospital, their son, Klauslein, being cared for in a children’s home.
The Gestapo had figured out that the rental car business—four cars and a gas station in Neukölln—Guschi and Gerhard had set up was being used to provide transport for the resistance. Working as a liaison between the underground in Berlin and resources in Denmark, and with Elisabeth and Klauslein in tow, Guschi would bring material to an uncle who lived in a fishing town close to Kiel. From there, the uncle organized the boats that carried literature back and forth to Denmark, a printing haven for the communists.
Guschi and Gerhard also used the cars to transport those fleeing the Nazis—communists, Jews, Social Democrats, anyone hunted—to the border of Czechoslovakia or to the Baltic Sea for transit to Denmark. The Gestapo rolled up the whole operation, then tortured and killed Guschi’s invalid uncle.
Guschi was in prison awaiting sentencing. Karin had been imprisoned for more than a year with no trial; Elisabeth was about to be released from the hospital to the care of Emil’s sister in Zehlendorf. Only Emil was at liberty, living in their Berlin apartment looked after by someone Kristel had hired. He was “closely watched.”
* * *
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By the beginning of 1937, Mott had three or four German refugees in the department and insufficient funds to keep them all. While Klaus waited to hear how Mott would resolve the situation, he joined a local relief committee organized to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and he attended the SCR, the Russian cultural group. The January 23 front-page headline in the Bristol Evening Post read, “Moscow Trial: 17 Plead Guilty, Charges of Conspiracy with German General Staff; Officials Accused of Anti-Stalin Conspiracy.” This was one of the infamous “show trials” that Stalin used to justify liquidating most of the old-line Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, as well as current members of the army—anyone who might pose a threat as an alternative to his increasingly brutal and unpopular leadership.
The SCR-Bristol branch discussed whether the evidence against the “traitors” was really true. When transcripts of the trials became available, the group decided to reenact them. As in Kiel with the agitprop performances, Klaus played the adversarial role of the vengeful prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky with zeal, as he had done with Hitler. Klaus’s venomous attack on the accused impressed Mott as a clear sign of “where his [Klaus’s] sympathies lay and always remembered it.” He knew nothing of Klaus’s earlier thespian pursuits. In this case, though, Klaus might not have considered Vishinsky a bad guy. Generally, Klaus judged most Western news on Russia as mere propaganda to destroy communism.
Whether the performance was a deciding factor or not, Mott chose not to fund Klaus in Bristol, but he did find him a position at the University of Edinburgh with Max Born, Mott’s former mentor at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He told Born that he was sending Klaus because Klaus “needed a change.” Born later heard that Mott’s real reason was Klaus’s communist activities, a claim Mott denied. Whatever the reason, Mott remained Klaus’s friend and supporter.
CHAPTER 8
War, Edinburgh 1937
Professor Max Born, chair of the department of natural philosophy—as the Scots called theoretical physics—walked to his office on the first morning back from his holiday, the first morning of the fall semester at the University of Edinburgh. He descended the stairs to the basement and strode along the hall of the former University Infirmary, the troughs on either side of the concrete floor a reminder of bodies on pushcarts. Off the hall was his office, a large and dark room that held his desk and chair, a couch, and a circular table and a rectang
ular one with chairs that had sat depressingly empty for the last year.
Born had come to Edinburgh via a temporary position at the University of Cambridge and a years-long one at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Before the Nazis stripped him of his position, he drew a constellation of young academic superstars from Europe and America. About a dozen would go on to win Nobel prizes, as did Born himself. One, Werner Heisenberg, who would serve prominently in Germany’s effort to build an atomic bomb, had already received the prize for work he and Born had collaborated on.
This morning something new warmed the dampness and cold of the coming bleak winter. At the table Born saw the eager faces of his first two graduate students. Both German PhDs in physics, they were relieved to have secured a position with him. The tall, blond, robust one, Walter Kellermann, the son of a rabbi, was an experimental physicist. The other, Klaus Fuchs, the son of a Lutheran minister, was a theoretician. Born later described Klaus as “weak in appearance but with a powerful brain, taciturn, with a veiled expression which disclosed nothing of his thoughts.” Born’s daughter Irene was softer in her comments but more prosaic, describing him as appearing to need a warm coat and a good meal.
Fuchs was not only a theoretical physicist but one whose fundamentals were rooted in mathematics, as were Born’s. Born and Fuchs came to physics for different reasons, but their path led through the works of such mathematicians as Euclid, Lagrange, and Gauss.
Fuchs and Kellermann, a gift for Born, rescued his scientific soul. Fuchs, especially, lifted a depression that he had carried inside for some time.
At the outset, Born gave them a piece of advice: do not speak German in public. Separately, he told Fuchs to stop all political activity. He wanted none of the communist propaganda that had caused Mott consternation.
Refugee aid organizations had sterner recommendations: no political discussion in public; no description of the plight of Jews in Germany; no talk of the Nazis’ real motives. They didn’t want refugees to be seen as warmongers. Negative feelings toward refugees, and Germans in particular, had already surfaced in Britain.
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Max and Hedi Born lived in a row house built entirely of stone, inside and out, that mirrored the city’s stolid facade—short on whimsy, long on steadiness. Born’s home was his favored setting for work, and Klaus joined him there regularly. Throughout the day, as he had with assistants in Göttingen, Born handed an idea to Klaus with a “Machen Sie das” (Do this). At the end of the day, Klaus often stayed for dinner and then played skat, a card game for three. He became part of the family fabric. When Hedi became a Quaker, Klaus did too, although he later remarked that his association was mainly to aid in contact with his father. He was an atheist, and although a pacifist at heart, he willingly joined the communists to drive out the Nazis. In doing so, he embraced their call for revolution.
Once a month or so, Born, an accomplished pianist, gathered together friends who made an informal chamber group. He invited Klaus to be second violin, even though Klaus was self-taught and didn’t play that well. Klaus also played the viola in a quartet with physicists and mathematicians, with Kellermann playing second violin. In both groups, others noted that Klaus routinely lost his place in the music.
Kellermann and Fuchs were much more proficient in their work. They attended math and physics seminars, some given by guest lecturers drawn from Born’s connections in Germany, some from his friends in the German émigré community. They began research projects and did some teaching, though Klaus less so. His German accent, stronger than Walter’s, didn’t resonate well with the Scottish ear. To bolster their credentials and guard against chaotic times, Born told them to apply to the university for a doctorate of science degree. Kellermann didn’t have the required publications to qualify. Fuchs had amassed many from his work with Mott and Born and earned the degree. Around the same time, the Carnegie Trust awarded him a fellowship in mathematics to study (1) quantum theory, (2) statistical methods, and (3) theory of atomic nuclei. Born frequently described Fuchs by using some variant of the phrase “the best of his age group,” favorably comparing him to his Wunderkinder, all those future Nobel Prize winners he taught in Germany.
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At the end of December 1937, the relative tranquility of academic life was shattered when Klaus learned that Gerhard was seriously ill in a sanatorium near Prague. It wasn’t only TB. He had had a mental collapse. Klaus continued to send Gerhard half of his twelve-pound monthly income from the university. Now he asked the British government for permission to travel to visit his brother, which it granted. Czechoslovakia, though, refused him a visa. He couldn’t turn to his father, who was barely surviving under the Nazis, so he wrote a letter to the Geheebs in Switzerland, close friends to Gerhard since the Odenwaldschule days:
Dear Frau Geheeb, I have received bad news about Gerhard and would like to turn to you with a request. Gerhard has had a complete nervous breakdown and at the moment is at an institution in Prague. . . . It seems urgent that he get out of Czechoslovakia into better air and a less stressful political atmosphere so that he really gets cured. I would be very grateful if you could procure the possibility for him to go to Switzerland. The greatest difficulty is surely the passport question.
I have written to Father very cautiously that Gerhard is down with his nerves. Because he cannot do anything from Germany, it is unnecessary to worry him with the stress.
There was more behind the letter. Nazi Germany had its eye on Czechoslovakia. As part of Hitler’s drive to annex foreign lands with a German culture, he demanded the Sudetenland, a section in the country that was majority German-speaking. Gerhard wasn’t in that region, but would the Nazis stop at some invisible line?
Unknown to Klaus, Elisabeth was in the thick of dangerous intrigues in Berlin. Her husband, Guschi, had been sentenced to seven years in prison, which he was serving on a ship that dredged the Elbe River. Through secret communication with Elisabeth, he had plotted an escape with another inmate. On the specified day, Elisabeth swam the Elbe to meet him, and he didn’t show up. Frantic, she returned to Berlin and told Emil she feared that the Gestapo had discovered the plan. She then ran off.
Emil heard a whistle outside—a signal—and looked out to see Guschi with old friend Arthur Rackwitz. Guschi told Emil that guards had arrested his escape partner. Guschi, who thrived in uncertain worlds, knew he couldn’t wait. He watched a man go into a hut on the bank and come out in workman’s overalls. Guschi sidled in, exchanged his prison uniform for the man’s civilian clothes, and casually walked out. Using money Elisabeth had passed to him earlier, he took a taxi to Berlin but knew he wouldn’t survive there as a marked man. He waited for Elisabeth until morning, but when she failed to return, he took off for Prague without her.
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To all appearances, Klaus had heeded Born’s warning against communist activities. In reality, he had strengthened ties with German communist friends in London. An acquaintance from his days in Berlin, Jürgen Kuczynski, arrived in the English capital in July 1936, and he quickly became the political organizer of the secret German Communist Party in Britain. Driven and extremely capable, Kuczynski took the thirty to forty longtime KPD members there and formed a disciplined, effective, and tightly knit group to produce propaganda material for the German underground. Klaus was one of them. He acted as a conduit, arranging to send the material via coal ships from eastern Scotland.
Thirty-two-year-old Kuczynski had studied statistics at a German university, been a postgraduate fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and headed the economics department at the American Federation of Labor. With excellent English, he crisscrossed Britain to publicize a new socialist-oriented publishing enterprise, the Left Book Club, lecturing to economically deprived workers. It was a perfect cover for his clandestine activities. Klaus’s occasional trips to London and
Kuczynski’s lecture tours gave the two men opportunities to stay in touch.
The Borns knew Klaus was a communist, and Kellermann suspected that his colleague had activist friends, although he had no direct evidence. The Born children and cousins braved Klaus’s long discourses on Marxism on their Sunday walks over the rolling Pentland Hills, as well as on outings to the movies to see his favorite, Bette Davis. On walks in the Pentland Hills with members of the physics music quartet, politics never arose. To most he seemed to be just one of many leftist graduate assistants, many of whom had been galvanized by the Spanish Civil War, where the main international aid for the Republicans came from communists.
Walter and Klaus rented rooms in town houses some three hundred feet apart on Marchmont Road, an area just south of the city’s large swath of parkland called the Meadows. Walter lived with his mother, who had escaped from Berlin, his father having died a few years before. Klaus lived in a miserable studio, one room in a dark and dank basement with a bed, two chairs, a desk, and no kitchen. One wall held a bookshelf with volumes from the Left Book Club but no propaganda leaflets, communist texts, or Marxist screeds. His landlady fed him breakfast; Walter’s mother washed his socks. The two physicists became good friends and often shared the twenty-minute walk to Born’s institute.
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