Paying the tuition for Gerhard at the Odenwaldschule worried Emil. A friend in London sent him five pounds—a windfall given the exchange rate—and rescued him financially. It allowed Emil to send twenty-five million marks as partial tuition payment. He ruminated, “But what is so much German money beside the five pounds? One feels how poor we have become.”
* * *
—
Emil sermonized about spiritual life but lived a political one, which could be dangerous, especially in the unsettled days of Germany’s first experiment with democracy, the Weimar Republic. The foreign minister was murdered, as were leftist leaders, and anyone such as Emil who was sympathetic to workers’ rights was automatically a “red” and treated accordingly.
Lutheran ministers were a conservative lot, and Emil was one of the few to join the moderate left-wing Social Democrats, the largest political party in Germany. The local newspapers regularly published his opinions and letters—as well as others’ dissents—as he pursued his passion for the rights of the working class.
Emil brewed his first political storm in the early 1920s with an article that condemned the murder of fifteen workers—supposed communists—by university students in a right-wing paramilitary group. As Emil later said, “the bourgeois world of Eisenach” was “completely inflamed.” The local church council voted to remove him from his parish. His parishioners gathered three thousand signatures to save him.
The strength of Emil’s convictions arose from his fundamental belief in God. For him, “the existing theology stood too far from practical life and life’s need of men.” In 1894, he had heard a liberal Lutheran minister lecture on the responsibility of religion to reach out to the working poor. He immediately rejected the conservative principles of his father, also a Lutheran minister, and four siblings. Throughout all the crises during the tumultuous era in which he lived, Emil exercised his ideals through this religiosity—something none of his children ever professed. He never looked back even in the face of desperation.
Emil’s notoriety fell on his children. When the mother next door learned the family’s politics, she forbade her children to play with them. Teachers, nervous from the political mood, lacked the will to protect them.
Of the four Fuchs children, Elisabeth, the oldest, was the least affected. She left for the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 1926. Gerhard, two years younger, and Kristel freely voiced their opinions and were hounded the most. Before transferring to the Odenwaldschule, Gerhard had stuck up for a Jewish boy bullied by a school gang. Emil found out that they were going after Gerhard too when the postman, stopping at the garden gate, urged him, “Pastor, hurry up. They’ll beat up your boy.”
Emil wanted Klaus, his second son and a “sensitive soul,” to follow in the family tradition and become a Lutheran minister. Klaus had other ambitions. Having inherited his father’s strong will, as well as a gift for mathematics, he won.
Since 1921, Klaus had attended Eisenach’s Gymnasium, a 750-year-old school originally church sponsored with instruction in Latin that had educated Luther and Bach. By the time of Klaus’s graduation, as a family friend later remembered, he was “known and famous” for his mathematics brilliance. His classmates vied for his help, especially in math. Even so, Klaus later said that he never had any friends there.
In 1927, Adolf Hitler, the hero of the right-wing veterans’ groups and leader of the rapidly rising National Socialist Workers Party, spoke at Eisenach’s Hotel Fürstenhof to a full house. The following year, the tenth anniversary of Germany’s new, supposedly democratic order, the government announced an award of a special history book to the top student in each city. After the celebration at school, Klaus came home and told his father that he had won the prize for Eisenach. Pleased, Emil replied, “You can be proud of that!” “No,” Klaus said, “I’m not. When the school celebration ended, the headmaster came past my bench and said, ‘Klaus, come with me to my room for a moment.’ There he gave me the book in private!” Emil saw his son’s hurt. He guessed that the headmaster considered Emil’s politics too well-known and provocative for a presentation to Klaus before the Gymnasium’s conservative students.
Unlike his father and siblings, Klaus didn’t engage in political discussions. Only once did he let politics provoke him. In 1929, at his school’s celebration of the republic’s constitution, students mocked the anniversary, hanging the republic’s flag upside down and wearing the imperial badge. Goaded, Klaus pinned the badge of the republic to his lapel. A student ripped it off.
This was Klaus’s last year at the Gymnasium. When he graduated, he came home and threw his books in a corner, angrily telling his father, “None of these masters ever gets to see me again!” There was one exception: Dr. Erich Koch, a young, exciting teacher of physics and mathematics. Throughout his life Koch remained friends with the “quiet and pale” young man from the Gymnasium in Eisenach.
Klaus would later describe his childhood as “very happy.” Certainly, at times it was. His kindly mother, Else, raised the children while Emil traveled to lecture on education and religion. “It was the power of my wife,” Emil wrote, “who, though suffering from many attacks of melancholy, perhaps for that very reason spread a circle of quiet joy which one could not resist.” When he was around, the rectory vibrated with evening discussion groups, formal instruction, and parties. A friend of Klaus’s remembered dancing to folk music and singing socialist songs. Emil described a “big, lively house.” His tempo ensured it.
Emil also had a tough side. Even he thought his political persona, with “hints and reminders and reprimands,” was sometimes too severe. He never connected this insight to the family. A good friend of Klaus’s later related that Klaus described his father as “a martinet,” as illustrated by his demand for coffee and cake at exactly 4:00 p.m. each day. As an older man, Klaus wistfully said to his nephew, whom Emil had raised, “I’m jealous of you. You had his kind side.” He didn’t stop with that, adding, “There are some things I can’t forgive him for.” He didn’t elaborate on the complex relationship.
* * *
—
It is unlikely that eighteen-year-old Klaus recognized May 12, 1930, for an especially consequential day when he took the train to Leipzig, filled out the registration card for enrollment at the university, and declared studies in mathematics and physics. His brother, Gerhard, who had been a law student at the university for the last two years, changed apartments so that the quiet, scholarly, and politically remote Klaus could live with him at Stieglitzstrasse 24. His sister Elisabeth lived close by while she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. But the larger world, as well as Klaus’s private one along with it, was shifting on its axis.
Leipzig was situated directly east of the center of Germany. It had grown from an important market town in the Middle Ages, with a confluence of three rivers and two important trading routes, into a large industrial one. Traditionally, the city enjoyed a strong economy and important cultural position. Along the way, it had attracted luminaries in the world of music. Eisenach’s own J. S. Bach had composed some of his most important works during his quarter century in residence. Mozart, Liszt, and Mendelssohn also spent time there.
But Leipzig, like all of Germany, was now in the midst of change.
* * *
—
Emil had shaped his children with the ideals of the Social Democratic Party. The SPD, which had a plurality in Germany’s parliamentary body, the Reichstag, had risen as a political force in the late nineteenth century, when two workers’ rights parties merged to advance equality and support trade unions in a capitalist system. Within it, though, a militant faction influenced by the teachings of Marx and Engels stirred tensions.
At the war’s end in 1918, fraught relationships forced a wrenching split in the fragile coalition. The moderates, Emil Fuchs’s branch, believed in a democratic process with a platform of social equality. The radicals argued that capi
talists would never willingly cede power and called for revolution. In the rupture, the moderates maintained the SPD name; the radicals ultimately became the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD. Immediately after the war, the radicals fought in the streets to establish worker councils mirroring those Russia had formed in its revolution a year before. The Social Democrats, who controlled the new government after the kaiser abdicated, crushed the revolt. Unforgivably, their militia tortured and murdered the revolt’s two leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. From then on, the communists hated the Social Democrats, even when facing threats far greater than their differences.
In 1930, the year Klaus entered the university, the Nazis earned 18 percent of the vote in the elections for the Reichstag, a huge increase over the previous election, but still the combined percentages for the SPD and the KPD were almost 38 percent. Together the SPD and the KPD had power, but animosity and zealotry prevented them from using it.
By this time, the Great Depression that had begun with the Wall Street crash of October 1929 had crossed the ocean and sent Germany’s economy reeling all over again. The new hardship was another incitement for the generation of unemployed young men who had gone from fighting in the streets to saluting “Heil Hitler.” But the belligerent and nationalistic ideas of the Nazis were not confined to the slums and the working-class districts. These same sentiments had infected many young people with the means to attend universities. Like their jackbooted colleagues in the streets, the right-wing students used violence to intimidate Jews and foreigners, especially to keep them from participating in the democratic process. They boycotted professors whose lectures didn’t promote Nazi ideals, pressuring the rector to remove them. Some of the faculty—party members who actively pushed Nazi propaganda—abetted the students. Others simply went along. As one professor in Leipzig later said, “It was totally futile to be against the National Socialists at the university, as a significant part of the faculty tended to the ideas of the right-wing party or had no desire to burn their fingers with the visibly rising new power.”
In February 1928, a couple of months before Gerhard had registered at the university, the yearly election for student council members took place. Elisabeth had watched it unfold. Candidates ran as independents or from student clubs, including political ones, and the results were astounding. Candidates from the Social Democratic Party drew 10 percent of the student vote. The total for the National Socialist candidates, along with a closely linked right-wing group, was 26 percent. A Nazi election placard had boldly predicted, “But we know, Leipzig will be ours.”
Gerhard and Elisabeth soon joined the Socialist Student Union, an affiliate of the SPD and the main resistance to the Nazis on campus. Gerhard organized lectures and celebrations and set up a dorm for needy students. Finding some time for fun, he put on cabaret shows where the women vamped and the men strutted. He took his turn spoofing Charlie Chaplin or a Nazi with a swastika emblazoned on his “Brown Shirt,” ogling the femme fatale. Given their father’s beliefs, it was a comfortable political home, although limited. The heated political flyers and impassioned voices couldn’t compensate for the paucity of members.
“To achieve something today without any political orientation,” Gerhard told a friend, means not coming “to grips with the central problems of this time and society.” Two days before Klaus arrived, Gerhard’s group, the Socialist Student Union, petitioned the rector to remove Nazi propaganda. The petition accused the Nazi students of slinging “the worst outgrowths of the daily political struggle.”
Klaus quickly joined the Socialist Student Union and followed Gerhard in joining the Reichsbanner, a paramilitary group closely allied with the Social Democrats. They were two of more than three million members nationally. In city streets throughout Germany, young men like them protested, marched, fought the Nazis and the communists to defend the republic, and suffered fatalities. Leipzig was no exception. When a group held a meeting in the evening, the opposition sometimes waited outside to attack. Klaus would later say that in Leipzig he learned more in the streets than in the classroom.
Nationally, the communists and the Social Democrats agreed on a united front against the Nazis in support of worker rights. But in Leipzig, the communist leaders verbally attacked SPD leaders, and even though the communist students disagreed, they stayed silent. The duplicity of the leaders and the cowardice of the students angered Klaus.
As roommates, Klaus and Gerhard filled hours analyzing the economic devastation of the Great Depression and the plight of the hard-pressed workers. Given the upheaval all around, academic work was almost an afterthought, but Klaus still managed to study. His physics professor was the young and brilliant Werner Heisenberg. But to Klaus’s dismay and boredom, this legendary theorist lectured on the basics rather than his insights into quantum mechanics for which he would soon win the Nobel Prize.
* * *
—
At semester break in August 1930, Gerhard suffered an acute lung infection, and fearing that the industrial pollution in Eisenach would exacerbate his frequent and debilitating bouts of asthma, he stayed in Leipzig. Klaus traveled to Dresden with members of the Socialist Student Union, and thus both brothers missed the excitement in Eisenach when, at the end of the month, the dirigible Graf Zeppelin skimmed the town to celebrate a Nazi gathering in the marketplace.
The next day a meeting in the city’s Wartburg Castle, famous for having sheltered a heretical Martin Luther, featured the fervent Nazi Hermann Göring. Meanwhile, at her school in Eisenach, Kristel, the youngest, listened to one particularly intolerant Nazi teacher. Overall Emil judged the local schools a “hair-raising” experience for his children, “almost driving them to despair.”
But in September, the nation’s attention shifted to Leipzig when three army officers accused of fomenting revolution on behalf of the National Socialists went on trial. These three had joined the Nazi Party, distributed their literature, and tried to recruit fellow officers—acts expressly forbidden by the army. It was a case of treason not seemingly widespread, but the government feared the efforts of these three junior officers might be merely the most visible evidence of a larger effort.
In the early morning chill of September 25, thousands of Nazis, young and old, waited for hours in front of the supreme court’s grand imperial facade. At 9:00 a.m., an exceptional witness for the defense arrived. The crowd cheered and saluted, awed by the presence of Adolf Hitler as he strode up the magisterial steps, his right arm outstretched triumphantly in the fascist salute. They swarmed after him in an unruly throng. Police blocked their entrance to the court.
The Nazi Party’s eightfold increase to 18 percent in the Reichstag just weeks before in the national elections made the National Socialists the second largest of a dozen or so political parties, lagging behind only the Social Democrats. Joseph Goebbels’s well-targeted propaganda had glamorized Hitler’s promises of the return to a glorious Germany. The farmer, the soldier, the lower middle class, and civil servants alike were enthralled.
For two hours, Hitler stood in the courtroom, testifying “that the German State and the German people should be imbued with a new spirit.” He assured the court that his revolution for a renewed Germany was appropriately political—the Nazi Party planned to govern by winning elections. And when he laid out his plans to rip up treaties and exact reprisals for past mistakes, the courtroom erupted with shouts of “Bravo!” The judge directly requested Hitler to deny the use of violent means. Hitler did so emphatically, his denial ending his testimony in what became known as his “oath of legality.”
The foreign press largely dismissed Hitler’s performance, but the German public saw a patriotic, respectable, and credible leader. It was a clear turning point. Within days, Wilhelm Cuno, president of a shipping line and a former German chancellor, pledged to introduce Hitler to financiers and industrialists. This former corporal and failed artist was not only powerful; he was now r
espectable.
* * *
—
When classes in Leipzig resumed in October, Klaus found himself facing down the Nazis without Gerhard. His brother had withdrawn from the university and gone to Berlin to try to recover at the home of the family friend and minister Arthur Rackwitz.
On November 18, Klaus and his club distributed leaflets to protest the Nazis’ “political radicalism.” Leaflets, the primary voice of political groups at a university, could be lethal. When criticized, the Nazi students attacked, and this time a riot broke out.
Three days later, university officials called a student assembly. The Socialist Student Union presented a resolution expressing regret over the unrest, blaming the National Socialist students, and calling for “a decisive position against the terror of the NS students.” It was signed “Klaus Fuchs, Vice-President.” In six months, he had made the transition from quiet scholar to activist leader.
The Nazis delivered their response, also in a leaflet:
The best should “prevail,” the best will “prevail”! The German youth, student, and worker in a Front, in the Brown shirt, derided and pursued—they carry on nevertheless. Nothing can shake our advance!
Four days later Klaus requested that the rector bring the resolution to the faculty senate for a hearing. Stressing the urgency of the problem, he wrote, “The great unrest in most of the various universities suggests that it is a deeper phenomenon that, in our opinion, must be fought as much as possible by the university.”
In 1931, as Klaus struggled with the Nazis in Leipzig and Gerhard with asthma in Berlin, Emil Fuchs was called to a faculty appointment at the Pedagogical Academy in Kiel. Buoyed by his degrees in theology, he was to teach religious science, an opportunity he had long hoped for. Initially when the minister of education proposed to call him to the post, the idea met “a very passionate resistance of all ecclesiastical circles,” Emil told a close friend and then jested, “That’s how important I am, I say with a smile, that my name arouses horror everywhere.”
Atomic Spy Page 3