Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  The depressing physical environment was made even worse by the government’s ban on newspapers, magazines, and radios, as well as ordinary mail. Within the camp, the rumor mill had the Germans surrounding Paris and Italy declaring war on Great Britain. The men had no idea what was true, but they wondered and worried if England was going to be the next to fall.

  With no communication in or out, the men also worried about their families’ lack of information on their whereabouts. Finally, the camp commander allowed them to send a letter or two a week on special spongy paper invented to foil the use of invisible ink. Censorship delayed the delivery and receipt of mail by weeks.

  In the mess tent, five hundred men at a time ate either “awful tasting” porridge or herring or “indescribable rotten stuff, 1/2 potato, 6 bitter beans, a little meat.” Two weeks into internment, one desperate sixteen-year-old cried out in his diary,

  Today again we got scarcely anything to eat. I can’t stand it anymore! I’m terribly weak and have a headache from sheer hunger most of the time. What will happen now! We’re wasting away in this mass imprisonment. I keep asking myself—why is all this happening.

  The government later admitted to “occasional considerable temporary shortages.”

  In their haste to create a system for internment, the government had mindlessly thrown together an explosive mixture of Jews, dangerous Nazi POWs, and communists. The POWs’ treatment, especially regarding adequate food, adhered to the Geneva Convention. Otherwise, the guards treated everyone the same—as though they were all enemies of the country. When the POWs sadistically taunted the refugees, especially the Jews, the guards did nothing, even though the guards knew who were refugees and who were captured enemy soldiers.

  The residents of Huyton, however, didn’t know. Newspapers had whipped up scares of fifth columnists with little distinction between Nazis and those who had fled them. When the refugees walked from the train through the town to the camp, some residents lined up on the side of the street to spit and jeer at them, assuming the worst. Given their own hatred of and persecution by the Nazis, the refugees were utterly confused.

  Internment deepened Klaus’s suspicions regarding Britain’s true motives. He told Kellermann that the government’s decision to intern antifascists to appease the right-wing press confirmed its real goal: “not to establish freedom and democracy, but to continue to attempt shameful compromises with the Nazis.”

  * * *

  —

  As the government came to grips with the almost daily “kaleidoscopic changes” in internment policy, the refugees experienced the impact. Fuchs and Kellermann heard that about a thousand of them were to be shipped to the Isle of Man, a rugged hunk of rock in the middle of the Irish Sea. In the early morning dew of June 14, about three weeks after their arrival in Huyton, the men ate breakfast, assembled for roll call, and marched through the town—displayed “like animals in a zoo,” one of them wrote—to take a special train to the Liverpool docks. There, armed soldiers loaded them onto excursion steamers, and they began the four-hour voyage out into a calm sea. Soon the British coast faded behind them. Just one month earlier, Fuchs and Kellermann had been at the Borns’ home, enjoying an evening of bridge.

  The Isle of Man was a favorite resort equidistant from England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Its capital, Douglas, on the southeast shore, had a broad promenade framed on one side by a long sandy beach and on the other by scores of Victorian-style hotels and boardinghouses. Normally, thousands of holiday seekers jammed the area, but the outbreak of war had canceled the vacation season for the foreseeable future. As in the last war, the British government requisitioned much of the island for a string of internment camps and forced out the owners of the boardinghouses. Workers had grappled with pneumatic drills to tear up the concrete on the sidewalks and install metal posts for a high barbed-wire fence.

  The refugees came ashore loaded with suitcases, boxes, even violins, and walked down the promenade enclosed by the new fence. A newspaper reported, “One ingenious fellow had casters fitted to his suitcase so that it could be wheeled along quite easily!” Crowds of townspeople pressed against the fence to get a look. A statement by the island’s governor marked them as “military prisoners of war.” A local newspaper labeled the bunch “ragged creatures.” The refugees referred to themselves as “His Majesty’s loyal enemy aliens.”

  Fuchs and Kellermann were assigned to Central Camp in Douglas: a block of white boardinghouses—seventeen in all—encircled by barbed wire, the six at the front of the block offered a prime sea view. Within a few days, another seventeen houses from the block next door were incorporated into Central Camp, in all a total of two thousand internees. Eventually, the island held about thirty thousand enemy aliens, men and women, in ten different camps.

  Central Camp was different from Huyton. Food was as scarce and hunger constant—they called the mess “Starvation Hall”—but the military commander gave the men much greater autonomy. Like Fuchs and Kellermann, many of the internees had entered England on student visas and were highly intelligent. The commander gave them the use of a few rooms for lectures, given mostly in German. The attendees brought chairs. The impressive range of subjects included literature, physics, theology, and philosophy. Fuchs gave a seminar on vector analysis.

  With a nod to democracy, each of the thirty-four boardinghouses in Central Camp elected a housefather. Fuchs represented his. Together they formed a “parliament” with a speaker and a deputy speaker to bring complaints to the commander. They assailed members of Parliament, refugee organizations, and trade unions with letters arguing for an end to internment.

  By now these men had been out of touch with the world for more than a month. They didn’t know the government’s plans; they didn’t know if their families were safe, had money, or had been rounded up. They did know that the British had made them sitting ducks if the Nazis crossed the channel. They had heard that the French had put Jewish refugees in camps and delivered them to the Gestapo. Would the British make them part of a settlement or prisoner exchange? Terrifying rumors swarmed.

  * * *

  —

  On June 30, German troops stormed and occupied the Channel Islands just off the coast of Brittany—perfect stepping-stones to the British naval base at Plymouth. With limited resources, the British government struggled to mount defenses for the anticipated German onslaught: repelling ground troops; withstanding high-intensity bombing forays; preparing civilian evacuation routes that left roads clear for troops; safeguarding children, some already sent to the country. The Blitzkrieg of Poland left no illusions about Germany’s intent to annihilate anyone who stood in its way, or about the difficulty of stopping it.

  These dangers did not make the government any more sympathetic to refugees who might pose a threat. Two weeks after the men arrived in Douglas, officials finalized plans to ship thousands of those under age thirty to more remote locations. The Canadian government had agreed to take seven thousand men: three thousand German POWs and four thousand internees who were, as the lord president of the council exclaimed to the Canadians, “the most dangerous characters among the Germans and Italians.” Another ten thousand were to go to Australia and New Zealand.

  John Anderson stressed undertaking a careful selection—do not mix Jews with fascists, do not include the aged or infirm—but his was a lone voice. The anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic factions thought that, “in principle, all alien internees were dangerous” and better “out of the country.” The pragmatists insisted that when the ships were ready to sail, those in charge should simply fill them up. Vetting to select “the most dangerous” or separate out political or religious persuasions was too cumbersome and time consuming. Take advantage of the Canadian quota, they argued, and fill the berths with whoever was at hand. Their argument won. No one told the Canadian government that the British had replaced the “most dangerous” with ordinary refugees. Likewise, t
he refugees had no idea of their new status.

  The substitution solved a couple of problems for the British. There would be no young, angry, energetic men making trouble in cramped boardinghouses on the Isle of Man or in camps such as Huyton. And there would be fewer mouths to feed.

  On July 2, the day before he shipped out, Fuchs wrote to Max Born:

  Dear Professor Born,

  I can only write a few words before we are leaving, since I have been running about all morning and there’s not much time left. It looks as if we are leaving Britain altogether, but as yet we do not know definitely.

  I have little hope to see Edinburgh again, and must try to express a few rushed words of all I owe you during the time I have been with you. I think you will understand without my saying very much about it.

  I find it hard to cut away from a country which I have learned to love, especially at such a time, and until the last moment I hoped that [it] might not be necessary. But there is no point in deluding myself.

  Hoping to see you and your family again in better times.

  Yours ever, Klaus Fuchs

  At nine o’clock that night, Fuchs, Kellermann, and nine hundred others marched to Douglas harbor, boarded a ship, and waited until 5:00 a.m. to steam to Liverpool. Among them was Hans Kahle, who, being over thirty, was outside the targeted age range but included because he was on a list of sixteen “Active Nazi Sympathizers.” He was also classified as a “troublemaker.” The latter label might have fit, but certainly not that of Nazi. Once again the government was jumbling Nazis, Jews, and communists together in its overheated search for “fifth columnists.”

  Once in Liverpool, Fuchs’s cohort of nine hundred, along with four hundred more directly from Huyton, were crammed into a large, dirty warehouse along the dock. They sat on their suitcases until mid-afternoon, when their ship was ready for boarding. They walked along a pier lined with rifle-toting soldiers and went up the gangplank to the SS Ettrick, a “big white ship” designed to accommodate 1,150 troops in hammocks and 400 passengers in cabins. A week before, as France capitulated to the Germans, the ship had evacuated Allied troops from Bayonne.

  The thirteen hundred refugees boarded and wound down the stairs deep into the ship’s bowels, where some were quartered in two low-ceilinged decks filled with long, rectangular dining tables. Others settled in the luggage hold at the very bottom. Each deck was about sixty by ninety feet and had a large central hold of fifteen by fifteen feet. The portholes had been nailed shut, and a nauseating stench of rotten food hit the men immediately, made worse by the hot and sweaty refugees themselves. A few naked lightbulbs hung from the rafters and lit up the depressing site. The doorway through which they had entered was the only exit back to the upper decks. It was big enough for one person to fit through single file, and its door was covered with barbed wire.

  When the guards distributed life belts and hammocks, the latter to be hung above the tables, there were not enough to go around, which started a ruckus. The unfortunate had to sleep on the floor, on or under the dining tables, wherever they could find space. A shortage of blankets caused another to-do.

  By 5:00 p.m. the transport was under way and, according to the rumor mill, en route to Canada. Two destroyers escorted the Ettrick out into the ocean. When they dropped back, the captain took a northerly route, zigzagging to evade U-boats.

  At 8:00 that night the men were fed, thirty hours since their last meal. After the prisoners cleaned up the dishes, the guard padlocked the door.

  A few of the men kept diaries, the pages filling with the physical and psychological torment that began on the first night. One described the discomfort and claustrophobia:

  There is no way out of this trap; the barbed-wire door has been closed and a sentinel guards it. We are truly caught. We are sitting, lying, standing shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, leg to leg. Some tread on us, some stumble and fall on us. . . . But mind your head when you stand up for hundreds of hammocks have been strung from the low ceiling.

  The refugees didn’t even have use of the entire space. Down the middle of each deck was a wall reinforced with heavy barbed wire and, beyond it, eight hundred war-hardened German POWs, the allotment of “the most dangerous,” as well as four hundred Italian civilians. Rumor was that the captured soldiers had been part of the original assault troops on Holland and Belgium.

  Kellermann claimed a place to sleep under a table but lost track of Klaus, who, it seems, had made his bed—literally and figuratively—with the communists on a different deck. It didn’t matter; the same squalid conditions, with everyone packed in like cattle, prevailed.

  Then seasickness added to their miseries. Vomit streamed down from those swinging in the hammocks. Kellermann’s fortuitous place under the table saved him from the torrent but not from the indescribable stench. No lavatory was accessible until the guards unlocked the barbed-wire door at 6:00 a.m.

  The second night, the crew handed out buckets; five sat on steps near the door. It was only a slight improvement. Finally, the colonel was persuaded to let one man at a time go to the lav during the night.

  Over the next few days, stomachs settled down, and a routine developed. The men gained permission to take saltwater showers and to go in shifts of three hundred to the upper deck for a two-hour respite from the “stinking hole.” Some played chess or skat. Twice a day they ate meals that were woefully inadequate. As one diarist put it, “The whip of hunger is once more beating us down into animals. We cheat each other, steal, and fight to fill our bellies.”

  The Nazis goaded, yelling that they were about to win the war, that the refugees would soon be forced to return to Germany. At night they sang songs “filled with bestial cruelty, lust for blood, and racism”; the refugees responded with “My bonnie lies over the ocean.” The guards threatened to shoot if the uproar didn’t cease.

  Early one morning, diarrhea hit almost all the men at the same time. The lav became hideous. As one refugee memorialized it,

  A sight worse than anything I have ever seen confronts me there. The pissoirs are choked and filled with vomit and shit. Shit and vomit everywhere. On the walls, on the doors, on the handles, simply everywhere. Here the portholes are open, but each one is occupied by someone whose body is thrown into violent spasm at intervals. All this is accompanied by groans. . . . My only thought is to get into a cubicle as fast as I can. I sit down, however much shit there is on the seat. Christ!

  Suffice it to say that there is no [toilet] paper and the drainage system had broken down. . . . This trip is turning into a nightmare. Never have I seen such conditions—people are desperate with pain and grief.

  The refugee doctors in the group thought it must be food poisoning from the tinned food. Others suspected that the commander had intentionally added a laxative to the food.

  A detachment of volunteers, manning buckets and mops and stripped naked except for the crew’s gum boots, waded into the ankle-deep waste and for four hours scrubbed the eight washbasins and four toilet stalls, cleaning out the toilets with their bare hands. There were no rubber gloves.

  Accenting the blur of brown excretions in the lav were splotches of bright red. One distraught internee had cut his wrists.

  Memories differ on who among them had volunteered to clean up. The divergence arose out of the cliques—the intellectuals, gangsters, musicians, and communists—that camp life fostered. The disagreement was mainly between the communists with Kahle’s leadership and the Cambridge group, a subset of the intellectuals, with Count von Lingen’s.

  An alias adopted to reduce attention, Lingen, a student at Corpus Christi College, was officially Prince Friedrich of Prussia, son of the crown prince and grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He wasn’t an intellectual or particularly bright, but he embodied a calm and respected authority.

  For sure, Kahle had secured power hoses, Lysol, and bottles of paregoric, an antidiarrheal and morphine d
erivative. But the Cambridge group took credit for the real cleanup.

  According to Klaus, the communists did the hard work, scrubbing. Klaus insisted that Lingen’s crew had kept only their own “corner” of the deck clean, ignoring the needs of the less educated Jewish emigrants surrounding them. In fact, both teams scrubbed and scoured in alternating shifts. But the ordeal lived on in Klaus’s mind as the epitome of class struggle.

  On the third day out, the refugees learned that U-boats had torpedoed the British transport ship Arandora Star, which had left Liverpool twenty-four hours ahead of them. It, too, had been bound for Canada carrying German and Italian civilians and POWs. Given the timing of the attack, the government knew of the tragedy before the Ettrick left port. Its sole effort to protect the second ship from a similar fate was to not announce its departure the next day.

  The BBC had reported that all on the Arandora Star were lost. (Later reports showed that half the passengers survived.) The father of one of the refugees aboard the Ettrick heard that news and believed his son to be on the Arandora Star. In despair, he committed suicide.

  For the rest of the crossing, the men crowded below deck listened to the vibrations of the engines and wondered what their fate would be.

  On the seventh day, July 10, someone saw two birds. The next day they saw “a long dark shape on the horizon” and presumed it was Newfoundland.

  The northerly route, and the zigzagging to evade U-boats, had lengthened the trip from four days to ten. As one internee summed it up, “It was the longest 10 days of my life.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Internment, Canada 1940

  The St. Lawrence narrowed, and the scent of pine and spruce wafted across the ship’s bow. Klaus Fuchs, along with the other thirteen hundred emaciated enemy aliens packed together on the ship’s deck, looked out on the verdant riverbank. After ten days of living hell crossing the Atlantic, this seemed like a vision of heaven. One internee estimated that given the bagginess of his clothes and the protrusion of his ribs, he had probably lost ten pounds on the trip. Now church bells pealed in the distance, and the earth smelled sweet.