Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Afternoons often found them sitting in one or the other’s room talking politics. Walter listened to Klaus argue that the appeasement policy of Britain’s Chamberlain government concealed its real goal, which was “to turn German aggression towards Russia.” (Many Britons, especially those in the upper class, did consider Russia the enemy more than Germany.) Given the nonintervention of England and France in the Spanish Civil War, Klaus called Kellermann’s contention that they would stand up to Hitler “starry-eyed” and cited Chamberlain’s calmly sitting by as the Wehrmacht marched into Austria in March 1938.

  And then, on September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had committed the cardinal sin of appeasement by handing Hitler the Sudetenland, confirming Klaus’s worst fears for Europe, and for his brother.

  * * *

  —

  Gerhard was still in Prague, but by March 15, 1939, when the Nazis swallowed the whole country, he had escaped, thanks to Quakers who had wangled a British visa for him to enter Switzerland the month before. In July, he flew to England with plans to visit Klaus in Edinburgh and then travel to join Kristel in the United States. Customs authorities refused him permission to land, though, because of his active case of TB, and he returned to Switzerland.

  Elisabeth’s needs were just as dire. She had never joined Guschi, who remained unaccounted for in Czechoslovakia. After he left Berlin, she had roamed Germany’s eastern border, then returned to the capital, where she spent her days painting and playing with her son. Sometimes, though, demons came, and episodes of madness descended. One night in the summer of 1939 while with Emil visiting friends in the country, she knelt beside her father’s bed, fraught with visions of Guschi tortured by the Gestapo. Friends from Berlin came to bring little Klaus back to the city.

  Elisabeth calmed herself enough to travel with Emil to the Quaker Yearly Meeting in Bad Pyrmont. During the few days there, she seemed stable; she chatted and helped in the kitchen. The day before leaving, she gathered with others in front of an open window for a photograph. She smiled gaily, her eyes bright and clear.

  On the morning of August 7, 1939, at the meeting’s end, she and Emil walked to the train station to depart for Berlin. Sensing that Elisabeth was unsettled, he held her hand as they climbed onto the train. As it started to roll, he dropped her hand to steady himself, and she dashed from his side. When he looked around, the train door was open. She had jumped. He found her at the bottom of a ravine with her head smashed.

  A few months later, Emil wrote to friends that the weeks since “had exceeded any misery or hardship I’ve ever been through. To this day, I do not know how to carry on without her.” But as with all the tragedies in his life—and he had more than most people could bear—he relied on God. “However, it has worked so far and has to work out further. God has helped and will help, and the love of many friends has carried me. . . . She was on the peak of her talent and her last paintings are the most beautiful. But that was probably the seeking of life further after this life.” Years later, Klaus saved this letter of his father’s out of hundreds.

  Within a week, Klaus began to receive condolences. He said little. On official forms, as he had done in relation to his mother’s suicide, he entered Elisabeth’s cause of death as “political reasons.”

  * * *

  —

  On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. This onslaught, the first example of the German tactic of Blitzkrieg, quickly overwhelmed the country’s defenses.

  Two days later, on Sunday morning, the Borns invited Fuchs and a few others over for cakes and tea. They were in the sitting room when the air raid siren sounded. Everyone jumped up to stand in doorways or scoot under tables. It was a false alarm—friendly aircraft mistaken for the enemy. It was also one of the last times they would gather for cakes, soon to be a scarce pleasure. That day, over the wireless, Neville Chamberlain pronounced, “This country is at war with Germany.”

  Britain’s declaration of war left Fuchs unconvinced. A war against fascism? he asked Walter Kellermann rhetorically. “No,” he answered, rather a war along old-fashioned nationalist lines. The British would fight for the survival of Britain, but not to defeat Hitler and defend democracy. He explained that his barometer was the British press. Except for Churchill’s speeches warning of Hitler’s aggression, he read little that showed awareness of Germany’s true intent. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Evening News, and others had supported Chamberlain’s appeasement in the face of Hitler’s aggressions.

  A twist on this argument explained Klaus’s rationalization of the stunning nonaggression pact between Germany and Russia signed a month before. In this pact, the two countries agreed not to attack each other or support another country that was their enemy. Klaus argued that Chamberlain’s goal all along had been to provoke a fight between Germany and Russia (with Russia the presumed loser). With many in the British government more sympathetic to the Nazis than to the communists, Stalin’s sudden shift was merely pragmatic. Russia needed time to build its defenses.

  There was substance to Klaus’s arguments. Russia had been in disarray from the time of World War I and the civil war that followed the revolution, as well as the years of famine and forced collectivization. Still, it was a jolt to idealistic Westerners who saw the Communist Party as leading the way to a new era in human development. For years, the party, and especially Germans like Klaus, had worked night and day to destroy the Nazis and fascism, not to join hands with them.

  Officially, the Communist Party pivoted its propaganda to decry an imperialist war. At the same time, tripping over contradictions, the British Communist Party issued manifestos and declarations that supported Britain’s new war footing. The government watched carefully for any call to resist it. There was none.

  * * *

  —

  In July 1939, Klaus had applied to become a naturalized British citizen, but he was too late. Once the war started, the government stopped processing applications. In a quick reversal, his category switched from refugee to “enemy alien.” Along with seventy-three thousand others—mostly German Jews—he was ordered to stand in court before a judge to determine if he was a danger to the country.

  Facing uncertainty and fear, the government convened 120 tribunals throughout the country to classify refugees. A was for those most likely to undermine the country, and they were immediately interned; B was for those whose allegiances were uncertain, and they had their movements restricted; and C was for those who were religious or political refugees, and they had few restrictions imposed.

  On November 2, 1939, on orders of the secretary of state for Scotland, Klaus walked with Max Born to the Edinburgh Sheriff Court in the center of the city. To this home of justice, its neo-Georgian facade embodying the values of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was to bring a statement from a British subject to attest to his character and the oppression in Germany. He had letters from Paul Sturge, general secretary of the Friends Service Council in London, and Born, whose own naturalization papers had come through just days before the war started.

  The courtroom held friendly faces. Walter Kellermann, accompanied by his mother, was there for his hearing. Besides police officers and officials from the British Home Office, representatives from Edinburgh’s Refugee Committee and Jewish Committee stood ready to assist if needed. The head of the Jewish Committee, Kellermann’s reference, graciously supported Fuchs as well.

  It was over in a matter of minutes. Those in attendance vouched for Klaus, a persecuted Social Democrat; the clerk took notes in shorthand; and the one-man tribunal, Chairman Simpson, ordered that as a “Refugee from Nazi oppression” Fuchs be granted “Exemption from Internment.” Klaus became a category C refugee with minimal restrictions on travel and movement; Kellermann earned the same.

  They walked back to Born’s department to continue their research and teaching. Fuchs had a new grant in mathematics from the Ca
rnegie Trust. With that funding, he worked on quantum dynamics and statistical mechanics with Born. Probably on his own, he explored the theory of atomic nuclei.

  Some of Klaus’s friends were less fortunate. A tribunal classified Jürgen Kuczynski, the energy behind London’s small group of German communists, in category A as a serious security risk. He was interned, but his connections ensured that it wasn’t for long. Members of Parliament, the dean of Canterbury (first cousin to the queen), and all manner of British elite pressured the Home Office to release him. Within a few months, he was free.

  A steady state of anxiety prevailed as the world watched Hitler overrun all countries in his path. In the early hours of May 10, 1940, from the ground, in gliders, with parachutes, German troops attacked Belgium and the Netherlands. Bombs shattered the rest. That evening, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister.

  The Borns had invited Kellermann and Fuchs over to play bridge. By the time of the party, the Belgians were only twenty-four hours away from surrender. The Dutch fell quickly thereafter.

  * * *

  —

  At its closest point, Britain is about twenty miles from the French coast. Within a matter of hours, Prime Minister Churchill ordered Sir John Anderson, the home secretary, to intern every male enemy alien between sixteen and sixty from the vulnerable eastern coast “in view of the imminent risk of invasion.”

  Anderson, a thoughtful and serious public servant, didn’t support internment. His report “Control of Aliens,” prepared two weeks earlier, argued for individual examination. He maintained that the government’s prior steps were adequate: registration for entry by immigrants; examination of the 73,353 aliens by tribunals; declaration of the eastern coast as a protected area that restricted aliens. Germans who were known or suspected Nazis had been encouraged to return home. Those who didn’t were interned. Anderson had concluded, “Obviously, no decision that a purely arbitrary proportion of Germans and Austrians should be interned could be justified. Nor would the internment of an arbitrary proportion without regard to the characters and circumstances of the individuals have any value for security purposes.”

  Addressing a large-scale internment similar to that in the previous war, Anderson asserted, would waste manpower, not guarantee the safety of vulnerable points, and rile public opinion. But therein was the problem. He knew that headlines such as “Collar the Lot” whipped up substantial public sentiment and “easily excited” negative feelings against refugees.

  Anderson lost the argument; the military prevailed. On May 11, he had to issue orders to the chief constables to intern the “enemy aliens” along the eastern coast. “All male Germans and Austrians, including refugees, ‘rounded up’ and interned,” Hedi Born wrote with alarm in her diary. The order affirmed Max Born’s belief in the ferocity of ideologies. He wrote to Hedi, “Fanaticism versus fanaticism, belief versus belief, the distortion and repression of truth is raised to a political art.”

  On Whitsunday, the twelfth, morning until night, constables rapped on doors up and down the coast from Nairn to Hampshire. Friendly, even apologetic, police told three thousand refugees to pack a suitcase with enough to last for two weeks and come along. Because of its location, those in Edinburgh, including Fuchs and Kellermann, were among the first to be affected by the day-old edict.

  It became evident very quickly that a fifth column, foreign collaborators inside a country under attack, had conspired in the annihilation of the Netherlands, so the pressure on Home Secretary Anderson didn’t stop. Churchill and others in the War Cabinet wanted to know the possibility of a German fifth column in Britain. Anderson met with the Dutch and learned that the Nazis had been able to set up agents there thanks to the Dutch having an open border with Germany, a right of free access guaranteed by treaty. The fifth column required no subterfuge. According to the Dutch, there was “no evidence that such assistance had been given by the refugee element.”

  The situation in Britain simply wasn’t analogous to that in the Netherlands. Anderson, convinced by the “very strong and obvious objections to wholesale measures of internment,” recommended that the government not implement a general one.

  The War Cabinet met at 10 Downing Street the next day and took up the question. There was only one vote in the room that counted: Churchill insisted on stiffer measures. By the end of the summer, the government had put about twenty-seven thousand men and women into camps. Interestingly, Jürgen Kuczynski, Fuchs’s London friend, wasn’t among them. His earlier release was permanent.

  In the eyes of officials in Whitehall, Fuchs, Kellermann, and thousands of other internees were no longer refugees from Nazi oppression but likely Nazi saboteurs. The government, in its muddled thinking about the dangers of a fifth column, had gathered up those most likely to be threatened by Nazis: Jewish refugees. Many in the War Cabinet and the security services felt that if there were an invasion, “a considerable number of enemy aliens, who might now be genuinely well-disposed to this country, would, by virtue of their nationality, help the enemy. On this view, even enemy aliens who were refugees from the Nazi regime presented a potential danger.”

  * * *

  —

  On the night of May 12, Fuchs and Kellermann found each other at Donaldson’s School, where the local police had deposited them along with scores of others. Empty because of a holiday, the school had transformed itself overnight into a miserable military transit camp. According to Born, Klaus went to the authorities, demanded urgent supplies for the internees, and helped to locate them. A few days later, after the military worked out a makeshift arrangement for their next camp, the police crammed the detainees onto a train and took them away. They had no idea where they were going.

  CHAPTER 9

  Internment, England 1940

  The British government’s conversion to an internment policy took one day. It had no official plans, procedures, or supplies, just precedent from the internment of enemy aliens during World War I twenty-five years earlier. Neither the government nor the refugees knew what to expect.

  The transport train from Edinburgh carried the internees south and several hours later stopped in Huyton, a small town outside Liverpool on the west coast. Klaus and Walter disembarked to a shocking reality. Before them were two twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fences that encircled a “camp.” Soldiers patrolled a narrow footpath between the fences while others, armed with rifles and fixed bayonets, stood on guard inside. Just a few days before, the camp had been a newly built housing estate—long lines of small, brick, single-family row houses for the working class. Half of it, separated by barbed-wire fences, was still ordinary housing. From one spot, the young men penned inside could see children laughing, riding their bikes, and staring at the “enemy aliens.”

  Guard towers that loomed over the camp were added quickly, and searchlights illuminated both sides of the fences. One internee called these towers “wooden shooting platforms” because “whoever enters the illuminated area is shot.”

  Threatened by Nazi aggression, British authorities were not afraid to employ methods that might appear reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Certainly, conditions were primitive. Each man filled a sack with straw to serve as a mattress. Each man had two blankets, a plate, and an enamel mug, but no towels and little soap and toilet paper. Suitcases doubled as chairs. Each man was allowed one bath a month, but the shortage of coal meant no hot water. Klaus and Walter’s good fortune was to be among the first arrivals, which earned them a strip of floor in a row house that would ultimately accommodate twelve to sixteen men. Those who came later subsisted in tents that, after a hard rain, filled with oozing mud.

  Klaus and Walter shared a room with blackout curtains and no furniture other than their straw mattresses on the floor. Two other men soon arrived to share their floor, veterans of the Spanish Civil War who had been sponsored in England by a Czech refugee organization. They were in fact German communis
ts who, like Gerhard, had fled to Czechoslovakia because of the Nazis. Although nothing was said, Walter sensed that Klaus already knew them.

  The military staff was overwhelmed as more refugees arrived at the camp daily. In the chaos, an internee by the name of Hans Kahle stepped forward. An early escapee from Nazi Germany, the forty-one-year-old soldier had commanded a battalion in the Spanish Civil War and, after many close calls, made his way to England in 1939. Local police had picked him up working on a farm in the countryside around Cambridge. He arrived in Huyton with a group of refugee scholars from the university. He exuded charisma and a sense of authority. His ability to take charge impressed another internee from Cambridge who wrote,

  He never raised his voice; he just took charge. People were split up in groups of twenty or so, each group allocated to one house and told whom to send off to find straw pallets, . . . whom to dispatch to check out cooking and washing facilities—things just fell into place.

  Kahle and Klaus may have met before, in Paris in 1933, or still earlier in Berlin, and if not on the Continent, then in London through Jürgen Kuczynski. Kahle had worked with Kuczynski to lead the group of communist émigrés who supported the German resistance. With veterans of the Spanish Civil War, with Czech roommates, with Kahle, with the shadow of Gerhard, Huyton wove together so many threads from Klaus’s former life. Internees later described Klaus’s voicing the communist line and hanging around with “a prominent German Communist” who was part of the Czech group. Walter Kellermann sought his social connections elsewhere.

  Conditions at Huyton were stark and depressing for the twenty-three hundred imprisoned men. In the first weeks, three men were shipped to a “psychiatric asylum.” Another hanged himself. As dirty and hungry as everyone else, Klaus shared the deprivation and powerlessness and despair.