Gerhard reassembled the shack by himself; while in Berlin the police closed in on Klaus. In mid-July, Klaus fled the city, just hours before the Gestapo had planned to grab him. He said goodbye to his father on the porch of an inn in Zehlendorf, boarded a train, and began his long journey into exile.
CHAPTER 6
Interlude, Paris 1933
Klaus rode the train to Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany, its outskirts abutting both Belgium and the Netherlands. Border crossings meant thorough checks of passports and visas, so Klaus climbed down from the train, crossed into Belgium on foot, and headed to Paris.
It was a well-worn trek for those escaping Germany. As arranged with his father, he sent a postcard from Paris signed “Dr. Dietrich.” A relieved Emil received it ten days after his departure.
The twenty-one-year-old, hunted at home, arrived in the City of Light with no prospects of an education, no facility with French, no money or job or place to go, separated from his family. It was an unnerving future. When he had to fill out alien registration forms later, he gave his address in Paris as 70, Boulevard Ornano, a highly styled Beaux Arts apartment building in Montmartre. That he ever lived there is doubtful.
He had come to Paris rather than Prague or some other city full of refugees in order to attend the World Congress of Youth Against War and Fascism, to be held in September. A KPD delegate, he had come early because of his flight from the Gestapo. About eighty other young Germans, many forced to hitchhike, would come later.
The city swirled with peace and antifascist activists that summer. In June, Paris had hosted the World Committee Against War and Fascism. The novelists Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland attended as members of the executive committee. On that board but not in attendance were intellectuals ranging from Albert Einstein to Upton Sinclair.
The influence of communism and Soviet Russia was not obvious, but many well-known communists in exile swirled about the city too, setting up the Communist International headquarters in Paris. Georgi Dimitrov, a high-level functionary in the Comintern, initially had the controlling hand in the congresses. Implicated in the Reichstag fire, he was arrested in Berlin by the Nazis, cutting short his tenure. With Dimitrov removed, the titular direction belonged to the charismatic figure Willi Münzenberg. With a genius for propaganda, he had spearheaded the 1932 congress in Amsterdam, using prominent intellectuals to advertise, and had drawn in two thousand activists against fascism. He had also created dozens of front organizations and established a successful publishing group in Berlin for the KPD. One of its newspapers was Mahnruf, which Gerhard had run.
The real direction fell to Dimitrov’s assistant Grete Keilson. A longtime party member, she had earlier been the assistant to the KPD leader Ernst Thälmann. Her husband, Max, an artist, created the graphics for the party’s propaganda posters in the Berlin headquarters. As Grete organized the first congress in Paris, Max awaited trial in Germany for the Reichstag fire as well. The Nazis released him in July, and he made it to Paris around the same time as Klaus.
Klaus spent his Parisian summer working with Grete on the youth congress. Once limited to fighting students in Kiel or hiding in the underground in Berlin, Klaus now had entrée to some of the most influential left-wing intellectuals, as well as communist leaders, outside Moscow. He had been a communist revolutionary for all of eighteen months.
* * *
—
Emil’s trial took place on September 22 at the special court of Thuringia in Weimar, a short distance from Eisenach. Crowded into the courtroom were about fifty members of the press, many of Emil’s friends from Eisenach, and four representatives from the Quakers.
There was only one state witness, Frau von Bardeleben, described by one of Emil’s friends as “probably the most unhappy person in the court.” Emil’s attorney put her through a long cross-examination. The issue was whether Emil thought the communists had set fire to the Reichstag. She repeated their conversation. In his defense, Emil explained that he neither subscribed to nor recognized the communists or the Nazis because of their use of force. In emphasizing his objectivity to the court, he offered the example of the politician from Cologne brutalized by the SA, asking, should that condemn all the SA?
Emil’s attorney demanded that the judge read the statement by this politician in which he described the SA’s vicious mistreatment. (From Paris, Klaus had contacted the man and gained the statement.) The judge read the document, but when it described the man being dragged through the streets and badly beaten, he whispered inaudibly. In his closing statement, Emil’s “very brave” attorney read the entire letter in a loud voice so that all could here. The Nazis never allowed this attorney to defend a political case again, but in receiving such punishment, he was fortunate. As Emil rightly said, “A year later, such words would have meant the concentration camp.”
The state’s attorney brushed aside defense claims of brutality and violations of due process and demanded a sentence of eight months. Emil had disrespected the government and violated the law of March 21. After half an hour’s deliberation, the panel of three judges agreed on his guilt and imposed a sentence of one month and court costs. Having spent five weeks in prison already, Emil was immediately set free. He celebrated with friends at the home of a friend in Weimar and returned to Freienwalde to spend the winter.
* * *
—
By the time the World Congress of Youth Against War and Fascism convened in Paris, at the end of Klaus’s two-month stay, he was living in poverty at the Quaker Bureau, his life unsettled and unsure and miserable. His father contacted a relative who had worked for a family in Bristol, Ronald and Jessie Gunn. They kindly plucked him from the bleakness with an invitation to attend the university there. The party had expectations of him to finish his education outside Germany. This was paramount so that after victory he could return as one of the architects of its future.
On Friday, September 22, at the Palais de la Mutualité, Henri Barbusse convened the congress, addressing the audience of 1,092 men and women, most in their twenties and representing forty countries, as “the shock brigade of contemporary humanity, the masters of tomorrow.”
Those in a hall “ablaze with color” beheld flowing banners, an exhibition of books illegal in fascist countries, and most inspiring, as the whole congress rose to greet them, the entry of the German delegation. Someone in the audience described them as “the living incarnation of the struggle, . . . who in spite of tremendous terror, had illegally, amidst the greatest odds, smuggled themselves over the fascist frontiers.” As they walked in, “the ‘International’ surged over the hall, when defiantly, with hands raised, they gave us the imperishable ‘Red Front’ salute of the fighting German youth.” Presumably Klaus walked with that group.
The congress had a goal: to “examine the uncertain and often terrible situation of the youth in capitalist countries and in colonial countries; and deal with the life, the work, and the hopes of youth in the Soviet Union, socialist countries and the sole hope of peace in the world.”
At the congress’s close on the twenty-fourth, the 1,092 cheered a call to arms: “We will win because we will fight for the world we want to conquer!” It was bold, it was revolutionary, it was inspiring for the young believers. That it wasn’t exactly a peaceful message didn’t seem to matter.
Whether Klaus stayed to cheer is not known. What is known is that he had to get to the French coast that very day to catch a ferry for England.
II
RESCUE
A guard tower outside of Camp L in Quebec, 1940
CHAPTER 7
Safety, Bristol 1933
Arriving at the port of Folkestone, twenty-one-year-old Klaus Fuchs descended the gangplank and entered the two-story Italianate customhouse, one of thirty-one hundred German refugees to enter Britain that year. When the immigration officer questioned him as to his reason for entry, he ha
nded him a letter that outlined an offer to study theoretical physics at the University of Bristol. It detailed free board and room from his sponsor Ronald Gunn, as well as payment of university fees by his father.
Despite being “white-faced, half-starved and with a dirty bag of linen,” Klaus was deemed a refugee of “good class,” and the officer granted him a landing permit with triple conditions: no employment without government permission, a time limit of three months, and registration as an alien in Bristol.
Permit in hand, Klaus followed the hall to the back of the building and climbed onto the train to London. There he changed to one heading southwest to Bristol, an industrial city of about 350,000 on the banks of the river Avon. The photograph on Klaus’s registration card stamped two weeks later in Somerset shows him wearing a serious expression and a roomy suit jacket, still pale and thin, but he could breathe in freedom. He could also continue his work in opposition to the Nazi regime. Shortly thereafter, he made contact with KPD émigrés in London.
Ronald Gunn, his sponsor, had easily obtained the letter that Klaus presented at the customs office. Although official forms listed Gunn’s occupation as a commercial clerk at the Imperial Tobacco Company, this prosaic description obscured family ties and inherited wealth. He was the great-great-grandson of Henry Overton Wills I, who had co-founded Imperial Tobacco, the largest of its kind in Britain. Gunn’s cousin Henry H. Wills had endowed the eponymous, state-of-the-art physics laboratory. Set high upon one of Bristol’s many hills, its crenelated tower beckoned scientists, whether esteemed or striving.
The difference in the social stratum between Klaus and the Gunns didn’t preclude a kinship. Jessie Gunn, Ronald’s wife, was a Quaker and shared several acquaintances with Emil Fuchs in the British Society of Friends. Ronald was at least a communist sympathizer and had traveled with Jessie to Russia in 1932. His and Klaus’s worldviews encompassed the same attitude toward social problems and found solutions in the Russian socialist system.
Klaus’s academic life began almost overnight when Gunn brought him to the physics department to meet its new director, Nevill Mott. Mott was twenty-eight, energetic, and an exceptionally capable scientist, having studied the mysteries of quantum physics with Max Born in Göttingen, Germany. Consequently, he spoke German, which was most helpful to Klaus, who spoke no English.
Klaus wanted to finish his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, but Bristol didn’t offer such a concentration, so he shifted to physics. Given the mathematical foundations of general relativity and quantum theory, it wasn’t a great leap. The real challenge was absorbing information from lectures given in English. After a frustrated Klaus attended a few, Mott suggested that he earn his “B.Sc. by research,” not course work. He rapidly advanced to a PhD.
Events in Germany had kept Klaus from math and science for the past year, but as Mott’s assistant he dived in and, in 1935, published his first article, “A Quantum Mechanical Investigation of Cohesive Forces of Metallic Copper Metals,” in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. The research reflected Mott’s interest in the properties of metals, for which he later won a Nobel Prize.
It was with another article written a year later that Fuchs made his first major mark in research. This work, which changed the fundamental understanding of the electrical conductivity of thin metallic film, served as a foundation for the development of microelectronics after the war. The results of the work—continually cited to this day—couldn’t be fully appreciated in 1936, but Fuchs’s singular intellectual abilities could.
* * *
—
Klaus received letters from home but few details. The Nazis controlled the information flow, causing one family friend to warn another, “Be careful what you write to Emil in Germany.”
In the spring of 1934, the Gunns invited Klaus to go with them on a month’s holiday to France and Switzerland. For Klaus, it became an opportunity to see Gerhard, whose underground work had moved from organizing students in Berlin to liaising with party officials in Paris and organizing émigré resistance in Prague. Gerhard had become adept at slipping over various borders and easily met up with Klaus. He shared the woes. Gerhard, Emil, Elisabeth, and her boyfriend, Guschi, lived together poverty-stricken in Berlin. Gerhard looked for a carpentry job, Guschi, for one as a locksmith, but his time in prison blocked opportunities. Elisabeth’s art flourished but earned no money. Shares of IG Farben inherited from Emil’s father-in-law offered some promise. With them, Gerhard and Guschi hoped to buy a couple of cars for a rental business and a taxi service, which they eventually did.
His children’s desire for a business relieved Emil. He assumed they had left their perilous underground life. They were just as committed though. Emil was the odd man out. Early on, the family had agreed to share only as much as was necessary. His children had no need to share with each other. The underground wove their lives and secrets together. They told him little, in part not to worry him and in part because he tended to speak loosely.
Kristel was the only one seemingly out of harm’s way. The government had granted her a visa for Switzerland to study psychology. Because of their prison sentences, Emil, Elisabeth, and Guschi had lost their passports and were trapped in Germany.
Gerhard’s news for Klaus offered little optimism, although Emil never lost hope. He persistently applied to the German government for a passport to go to Britain or the United States.
* * *
—
It was fortunate that Klaus made the trip with the Gunns in the spring. His German passport expired in June, and after a back-and-forth with the German consul in Bristol, he learned that the German government would not renew it. Instead, it offered him a one-way temporary pass to travel home. As a political refugee from Nazi oppression, he knew this option was meaningless. Returning meant certain arrest and torture—maybe death.
In October 1934, Klaus’s stateless condition became a crisis. Refugees could not stay in England without Documents of Identity. The government issued them only for travel outside the country, not for residence within it. Without either a passport or these documents, he had to return to Germany.
Despondent, Klaus waited for deportation orders, but the angels of good fortune struck again. After four days, the Home Office offered a reprieve: Registering with the police would be sufficient, although there was a complication. To reregister required permission from the Home Office, and it needed an official ID paper such as his expired German passport. Klaus had sent this document to the German consul. He wrote and asked to have it sent back to him, and surprisingly the German consul complied without ado. By year’s end, Klaus received his registration card, a welcomed Christmas present. The only restriction was foreign travel, which required permission.
Unknown to Klaus, the police president in Kiel, with whom he was well acquainted, had sent information on Klaus’s life there to the German consul, and it reached the chief constable in Bristol. The chief constable relayed it to MI5 with a note summarily categorizing Klaus as “a notorious Communist” but also stating that he was “not known to have engaged in any Communist activity” in Bristol. In a routine gesture that would have much greater significance years later, MI5 opened a security file on him.
Contrary to the chief constable’s belief, Klaus was engaging in communist activity in Bristol, although quietly. Students and faculty often gathered to discuss politics, and the majority view was far to the left. Klaus didn’t participate, but he did leave propaganda pamphlets around the department. He also belonged to the university’s Socialist Society. Its chair later described admiringly how at one meeting Klaus had a slip of paper with a message from “a Continental socialist” predicting a verdict in the trial on the Reichstag fire. A couple of days later, a main defendant, Georgi Dimitrov, was released. The chairman figured that Klaus had very good sources. He did. There was a small British network—émigré friends from the Berlin underground—and he was a par
t of it.
Otherwise, Klaus wasn’t so different from many of his fellow students and faculty members. With Hitler and Mussolini ascending and with fascist stirrings in Spain, the youth especially reacted against a world tilting to evil. Bread lines, unemployment, and persistent economic anxiety lured tens of thousands to the ideals of communism. People simply wanted basic security with food, shelter, and education, something better than what they saw as the capitalist misery that robbed them relentlessly. Studying Marx and Lenin—an opportunity Klaus took in Bristol—was not extraordinary, as was obvious from a new endeavor.
In 1934, Klaus helped Ronald Gunn start a branch of the Society for Cultural Relations Between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the U.S.S.R., more succinctly the SCR. Gunn was chairman; its secretary was the wife of Ronald Gurney, a lecturer in the physics department. Although Klaus was never an official member, he regularly went to meetings. With 110 members (one of the more active branches) its inaugural year was sufficiently successful to receive praise in the SCR’s annual report. Nevill Mott was listed among the 110. Gunn often held meetings at his new “concrete House,” a marvel of engineering and something that drew neighbors’ interest.
The SCR grew out of august origins. Virginia Woolf was a co-founder in 1924; John Maynard Keynes was its chair in 1936. Its list of vice presidents was a who’s who of British intelligentsia, the likes of E. M. Forster, the dean of Canterbury, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell. The future Nobel physicist Patrick Blackett was on the executive committee. Headquartered in Bloomsbury two blocks from the British Museum, the group had thirteen hundred members, excluding branches such as Bristol. Membership offered opportunities to tour Russia—the Leningrad Music Festival, the Moscow Theatre Festival—and tickets to Soviet art exhibits, lectures, and ballet imported to London. The 1934–35 annual report heralded “the great improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations” marked by the visit of Anthony Eden, then an undersecretary in the Foreign Office, to Moscow. It was the first official visit since Lenin seized control of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
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