The internees thought of separation in terms of Nazi versus anti-Nazi, not race or religion. New friendships among the Jews (confessing and non-confessing), Protestants, and Catholics had eliminated religious boundaries. A primary worry was the makeup of the alternative Aryan camp. Would it be a “Nazi camp,” one filled with pro-Nazi Germans?
Major Wiggs wrote a letter to the director of internment operations supporting the refugees’ position. The director would not alter the decision.
Canadian officials knew the total number of Gentiles—141—but not the names. When surveyed, only 80 identified themselves. Major Wiggs wanted the missing 61 names, who happened to be the political refugees. As one refugee noted, it boiled down to “where Kahle and his group were sent.”
Schemes floated up to fill the “Aryan” quota. Jews who wanted to stay with close Gentile friends considered losing a Jewish parent and becoming “1/2 Jews”; Gentiles who wanted to go to the Jewish camp suddenly discovered Jewish grandmothers in the family tree.
Jews who considered racial separation anathema didn’t care who the sixty-one were. They wanted to thwart the government’s intent. Kahle used the refugee committee to do so. Unusually direct for him, Klaus later declared, “I was especially responsible for the review of the refugees in the camp.” He craftily kept Kahle’s group out of the “Aryan camp.”
Major Wiggs sent off the final list of names for the two camps on October 8 and informed Lingen that he was one of a hundred going to the Aryan camp.
* * *
—
On the morning of October 15, the “kosher” group said sad goodbyes to the others and walked to the train station in the pouring rain, wearing the hated POW uniforms: blue trousers with a red stripe down the sides and a blue jacket with a large red circle on the back they likened to a bull’s-eye target. On either side soldiers with bayonets guarded them. At 8:30 a.m., the train departed with 618 men eagerly awaiting the model camp promised them.
The train traveled for a few hours through dense forests and by rippling lakes and reached the end of the line at 1:30 p.m. The men looked out the windows and saw two huge, seemingly abandoned brick buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Disembarking, they traipsed through the mud and rain into the larger of the two. They found dust and soot covering six stinky indoor latrines, five cold-water taps, and six lights with bare bulbs. The empty buildings were part of a railroad depot near Sherbrooke and Newington, small towns south of Quebec. To the men, Camp N, as it was called, was “worse than imagination could have invented:”
Train tracks criss-cross the stone floor, which is covered with a layer of foul-smelling mud. There are several large pits in the floor, half filled with stagnant water. . . . Everywhere puddles of rainwater have collected. It has either blown in through the broken windowpanes or leaked through the roof.
As the refugees would find, the “worse” was yet to come. When they objected to the putrid dump and their treatment, the commandant threatened to shut the doors, turn off the lights, turn off the heat, and cut off rations; if that didn’t work, he would request that Ottawa transfer them to a Nazi camp. The sergeant major, a bull of a man with “malicious eyes and a hateful glean,” yelled at those he called “dirty Jews.” Sadistic guards shoved anyone who didn’t obey into an isolation cell, cold, dark, and cramped, six feet by four feet, with a sack of straw, no light except a window, and a pail for waste. An internee equated them to Nazis, “brutal men without heart and some who delight in malice and bad treatment.”
Camp life continued nonetheless, with hut fathers, who included Fuchs and Kellermann, and with Kahle named as camp leader. Regular mail, magazines, and newspapers arrived. The men organized to make the camp habitable. They slept, ate, cleaned, and built the facilities they needed.
* * *
—
The word “release” was in the air, Canadian and British newspapers having quoted politicians who dared to utter it. By November 1940, the Germans were no longer on Britain’s doorstep. The government had withstood the Blitzkrieg. It could now address the “vocal element”—the internees and their supporters in the Commons. “The rough and ready measures adapted in the early summer,” it said, “had been justified by the danger during that period, but we can afford to take a less stringent line.” The government’s emissary for a “less stringent line” was Alexander Paterson, His Majesty’s commissioner of prisons in Britain and a true social reformer, the perfect ambassador.
Paterson arrived at Camp N in mid-November’s frigid weather wearing a tweed suit, a hat, and no overcoat. The refugees judged him “our savior, our messiah.” For three days he sat in a makeshift office high up in a loft interviewing 350 internees in category C, Fuchs and Kellermann among them. Days later, a mere 11 names appeared on a list for release for home. Kahle and 10 others left the camp, no other information given. In a few more days, a camp official posted another list with 156 more to leave in mid-December. This one included Fuchs and Kellermann.
The night of December 15 was a time for parties and farewells for the chosen 156. The next morning, they began a twenty-eight-hour train ride to Halifax. Just before Christmas, they boarded the Thysville, along with Kahle and his group of 10, and feasted on hors d’oeuvres, soup, fish, chicken, and special Christmas pudding. One of the internees thought it the best dinner he had ever eaten. They sailed the next day in a convoy.
With the Battle of the Atlantic in full force, they crisscrossed toward Iceland to avoid U-boats. Unlike during the trip over, they “traveled like grown-ups,” staying in cabins, sleeping on clean sheets, eating good food, and all without guards. But they slept in their clothes and wore life belts. The sea was choppy, breakers washed over the bow, and U-boats were still an invisible threat.
Seventeen days later, on January 11, 1941, they cut through a minefield near the Irish coast and reached the Liverpool harbor around 9:00 p.m. Air raid sirens screamed, delaying their disembarkation. With its access to the Atlantic and its war construction, Liverpool was under constant threat from German bombers. Just two weeks earlier, 350 people had died in a Luftwaffe raid.
After the all clear, the returning detainees descended the gangplank, where soldiers again waited with bayonets. Dismayed, the captain explained to the commander of the detachment that these were not dangerous men. The troops removed the bayonets.
Immigration officers processed Fuchs and Kellermann at Huyton Camp and gave them ration books and train tickets to Edinburgh. The government had granted them permission to reside in the protected coastal area. By the thirteenth, they were home. It had been a very long eight months, and a critical period in Klaus’s life, especially the close camaraderie with Kahle. How much of a difference Kahle made in his allegiance to communism is not known. But it certainly would have reinforced a commitment to the cause.
III
RESEARCH
Main Gate at Los Alamos, 1940s
CHAPTER 11
Tube Alloys, Birmingham 1941
Januarys in Edinburgh are blustery and gray. The cold, raw air from the English Channel blankets the city of stone and seeps into the bones. When Klaus and Walter arrived at Waverley Station in January 1941, the weather was typically bleak, the chill cutting deep, though still mild compared with Canada. The city was relatively quiet, the sky free from planes and falling bombs.
Max Born was surprised and delighted to see his former associates. Neither one talked much about the camps, but Born knew it had been rough. What he did not know was the effect of those camps on Klaus, one that had drawn him much closer to his communist friends.
Born wanted Kellermann and Fuchs—especially Fuchs—to stay in Edinburgh to continue their studies and research, but that would require that he find funding for them. The university had no money or grants; fellowships from foundations, the Carnegie Trust for one, no longer offered enemy aliens research support, although Born hoped that Fuchs co
uld be an exception. An obvious employer, the British government, restricted enemy aliens from working on confidential weapons research. Klaus had reapplied for naturalization to reverse that problem, but it wasn’t always a remedy and would take time. Teaching was a possibility. British physicists’ work on weapons research had created a shortage of math and science teachers in secondary schools and colleges.
Kellermann received an offer from a college in Southampton, located on the south coast and a prime bombing target for the Luftwaffe. He gladly accepted the appointment despite the risk.
Although Klaus was primarily a researcher—since returning, he had already written two papers that Born judged “excellent”—he did apply for one teaching job that didn’t work out. Another possibility, though, hovered in the background.
While Klaus was in Canada, Rudi Peierls at the University of Birmingham had written to Born asking if Klaus would be available for a teaching position with him. Peierls was a highly respected physicist, a German émigré, and a good friend of Born’s. He had first met Fuchs years earlier in Bristol with Nevill Mott, and then again when he gave a seminar in Born’s department. He respected Klaus as a scientist and had used some of his results in his own research. Ultimately, the uncertainty of internment had led Peierls to hire someone else. Even so, he asked Born to let him know if Fuchs needed funding.
In March, Born approached Peierls, who had nothing immediate to offer. Then things changed. By the beginning of May, Peierls was a consultant to the Air Ministry and needed a good physicist. Fuchs’s status of “enemy alien” constrained Peierls from specifying the nature of the job other than “theoretical work involving mathematical problems of considerable difficulty.” Still, Fuchs was his choice, and he wrote to Born about the position. He included a detailed letter to Fuchs, giving Born the option of not passing it on “if you think he ought not to take the job.” His hesitation wasn’t in deference to Born, who he knew couldn’t keep Fuchs. Mott and Peierls were good friends. Had Peierls heard something from Mott about Fuchs’s politics that could lead to a problem with government clearance? He didn’t elaborate.
During this period, some of Fuchs’s friends from the camps visited Edinburgh a time or two, reasons unidentified. Kuczynski, an outsider to that particular group, also made the trip. In April 1941, Fuchs returned the favor by traveling to London to attend a party probably held at the Free German League of Culture. Established in 1939 by Jürgen Kuczynski and a number of other German émigrés, it was antifascist, with a strong communist strain of the German type moderated by influence from the Social Democrats.
Bringing German art, literature, lectures, and social events to area refugees, the league occupied a large brick four-story semidetached Victorian house on Upper Park Road in Belsize Park, London. Before the league took it over in 1940, Kuczynski and his wife had lived there. Unlike many of its neighbors, it had made it through the Blitz unscathed. In this warm and comfortable setting—it had rooms for lectures, exhibits, and meetings, a café and a restaurant, a library and an office—Klaus could easily see friends from the Berlin underground and from internment, Kuczynski and Kahle among them. Old associations and memories were everywhere. One of the main organizers of the league was Alfred Meusel, the professor whose lecture Emil, Gerhard, and Klaus had heard in Kiel the night before Else committed suicide. The world of German communists in London was small and close.
Details are vague, but another attendee at the April party might have been Simon Kremer, officially the secretary to the Soviet military attaché in London. According to MI5 files, he was also an agent for the GRU, the arm of Soviet security concerned with external espionage, as was Kahle. About Kuczynski, MI5 wasn’t sure.
Klaus always avowed that he asked Kuczynski for a contact—who turned out to be Kremer—but the truth of who initiated the encounter may have been someplace in the middle. Kremer might have met Klaus there or at some other function to observe him, with Klaus not knowing who he was. Kahle would certainly have been very involved in the plans. Whether Kahle and Klaus had ever discussed such a possibility while in the camps is unknown, but even if not, it couldn’t have been far from Kahle’s thoughts.
As much as Kuczynski, Kahle galvanized the German Communist Party in Britain, just as he had taken charge in the camps and embodied General Hans for Ernest Hemingway.
* * *
—
Klaus found himself at London’s King’s Cross rail station at 11:45 on the night of April 15, having missed his train back to Edinburgh by fifteen minutes. Still required to check travel plans with the police, he notified them and was told to take the next train at 4:30 a.m., which he did. In spring 1941, neither the police nor MI5 had reason to take note of him.
Once Klaus was back in Edinburgh, Born passed the letter from Peierls on to him, and the discussion moved quickly. By May 22, Fuchs had visited Birmingham, accepted the offer, and received a provisional work permit, renewable monthly to work on the “undisclosed” research. Given that the Air Ministry banned enemy aliens from its payroll, Peierls had to finagle a salary scheme for his new recruit. The “undisclosed” research with which Peierls had become involved would ultimately bring World War II to a dramatic close and heighten the tensions of the cold war to follow.
* * *
—
In March 1940, Peierls and the Austrian refugee Otto Frisch, also in Birmingham at the time, wrote a memo that redefined the feasibility of an atomic bomb, contradicting the assumptions of a panel of eminent British scientists. It came about, in part, because as German refugees they were excluded from wartime weapons research and had time to indulge their curiosity.
Both men were brilliant physicists. Frisch had the benefit of a distinguished scientific lineage. His aunt, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, had spent thirty-one years in Berlin working with the German chemist Otto Hahn, before having to escape to Sweden in 1938 because she was Jewish. In their last four years together, they had bombarded uranium with neutrons. Hahn continued with his bombardments after Meitner’s departure and a few months later obtained results that would only in retrospect be understood as showing that the atomic nucleus had been split. Hahn, not quite understanding what he had, immediately wrote to Meitner.
Meitner along with Frisch, who happened to be visiting, worked out the physics, ascertaining that the uranium atom had split and, in doing so, had produced two different and smaller nuclei. In the beginning of 1939, shortly after Hahn published his groundbreaking article, they published theirs, explaining why the uranium nucleus had split and ejected neutrons and released massive amounts of energy—nuclear fission.
Splitting one nucleus did not create an atomic bomb. Scientists needed to split many nuclei very quickly to release enough energy for an explosion, and the most abundant type of uranium atom, the isotope U-238, couldn’t do that. They needed an atom that could split and eject enough neutrons at the right energy to hit another atom, which would then split and continue the process, a chain reaction, to create an explosion and release massive amounts of energy. They identified a uranium isotope that could do that.
All elements have isotopes (that is, an atom with the same number of protons in the nucleus but a different number of neutrons), and they soon realized that a particular uranium isotope, U-235, was fissile, meaning it could create a chain reaction. The problem is that U-235 constitutes a very small percentage of natural uranium, 0.714 percent. With that low density, chain reactions fizzle out before reaching the critical stage for a nuclear explosion. British physicists, therefore, had assumed that vast amounts of U-235 were necessary for a bomb, which would make one difficult to create during wartime.
The key insight in Peierls’s and Frisch’s memo was that a sustained chain reaction could result from a relatively small amount of U-235.
In the spring of 1940, Peierls and Frisch kept their idea secret, giving their only extra copy of the memo to the head of the theoretical p
hysics department at Birmingham. He, in turn, alerted a top science adviser to the government who shared it with a few more. They realized that the Peierls-Frisch memo necessitated a second examination of the feasibility of an atomic bomb.
Days later, The New York Times ran the article “Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Science.” It painted a rosy, perhaps cavalier, picture of the probability of exploiting the potential power in U-235, saying, “All that is necessary to liberate its energy is to keep it in contact with a constant flow of cold water.” Already General Electric, it reported, had “separated a relatively large sample of the U-235.” The article offered no rationale of the method or proof of this claim—nor in fact was it true.
One detail in the article drew special attention, especially from German refugees. The newspaper had a report, supposedly leaked “through highly reliable channels,” that the German government had ordered its scientists and engineers to devote all resources to the work of extracting U-235 from uranium. This information compelled a noted émigré chemist at Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, Francis Simon, to write to Churchill’s chief science adviser urging him to expend more research resources on U-235. The outcome was a blithe memo from the adviser to Churchill unequivocally stating that there was no danger of U-235 becoming operational for some years.
In spite of this memo, Churchill agreed to create the so-called MAUD Committee. Government regulations excluded enemy aliens, in this case Peierls and Frisch, from belonging, but the Nobel laureate G. P. Thomson, the chair of the new committee, knew them as “reliable” physicists and wanted their contributions. He explained to the government that “the initial stage of the work will be on a laboratory scale”; that is, the small-scale nature of the research meant they wouldn’t run afoul of regulations, and they could be included in the first stage of the investigation. Thomson anticipated problems with the next stage, saying, “If and when it is found that there is a real promise of success, it would be necessary to work on a much larger scale and I think that then the question of the collaboration of PEIERLS and FRISCH would need to be reviewed.”
Atomic Spy Page 13