Newspapers were abuzz with rumors about his release. No one could miss that he was about to leave. Rudi Peierls sent him a short note:
Dear Klaus,
I saw from the papers that you are soon going to be released.
If you need any help in getting started in life, financial or otherwise, or if you need advice, please let me know. I shall do what I can.
Yours Sincerely,
Rudi
The two had had little contact over the years. The letter must have been hard for Rudi to send and for Klaus to receive, so hard for the latter that he did not respond, although he did save it. According to Genia, Rudi never forgave that slight. As for Klaus, a normally courteous person, he felt his friends had abandoned him, even though Erna Skinner had complained about his not writing to her. It was one of those misperceptions that would never be resolved.
The one person Fuchs did trust was Henry Arnold, the last familiar face he saw. Arnold, although retired since 1957, had stayed in touch with Fuchs about his finances and helped with plans for his release. He defined his feelings about Fuchs with two remarks—one about relief and one about regret. The first one he made in 1956, referring to an anticipated last visit to Fuchs to discuss finances: “I’ll be glad enough, you may be sure, when that’s over and done with.” The other was years later: “I can’t call him a friend exactly, but I had affection for him. . . . Well, was it affection? More than friendship, I felt sorry for him, because I knew for a long time how it had to end.” That Arnold did whatever he could for Fuchs throughout his stay in prison suggests that it was probably more than that, that genuine caring took hold of him. It did, in fact, take hold of Fuchs.
* * *
—
At 7:00 on Tuesday morning, June 23, 1959, reporters who had staked out Wakefield prison saw a thin, older Klaus Fuchs walk out wearing an oversized, double-breasted brown suit—three pens in the top pocket—and a brown trilby. He and three policemen quickly climbed into a black Morris police car that was followed by another police car to keep reporters from getting too close. The night before at midnight, security had carried out a decoy removal to confuse reporters, unsuccessfully.
Zipping through the city of Wakefield at fifty miles per hour, they drove south on Great North Road, through old villages and towns, past miles of fields, and stopped for lunch at the Bedford police station. It had been six years since Fuchs had seen the outside world, and on this Tuesday a clear vista greeted him, the temperature comfortably in the midseventies. He probably didn’t see much change, though, because Great North Road hadn’t changed in decades, maybe centuries. But it was coming. Out of sight, just to the west, the government was about to open the country’s first modern motorway, the M1, to replace it. They were driving to London Airport, southwest of the city. If his journey took him close to London, the change would have left him awed.
At London Airport, he sat in a private room with his security men until the flight was ready for departure. The aim to minimize publicity had failed, but security kept reporters and photographers at a distance. That his reservations were under the name Herr Strauss didn’t help a bit.
Mixed feelings accompanied his departure. One headline read, “Good Riddance!” and another, “Fuchs: No Resentment.” A former inmate was quoted as saying, “The Doc—one of the best.” Fuchs didn’t have too much to say. In conversation with a reporter, he expressed some regret at leaving Britain but pleasure in being reunited with his father “on the other side of the Iron Curtain.”
The Polish Airlines flight was a regular commercial one, and Fleet Street reporters had all bought seats with dreams of an exclusive story. The police cleared a path through the photographers. Fuchs climbed the stairs to board the plane and disappeared.
VI
RETURN
The Loschwitz neighborhood in Dresden where the Fuchses had a weekend house
CHAPTER 25
East Germany, Berlin 1959
Around 7:00 p.m. on June 23, 1959, the Polish airliner carrying Klaus Fuchs approached Schönefeld Airport in Berlin’s eastern sector. This flight was the final leg in a twenty-six-year journey, almost to the day.
From the West Berlin side of the border, a dozen or so reporters sat in cars watching. Those who had obtained entry permits from East Germany crowded into the airport’s restaurant, waiting. Once the plane landed, the ground crew waved the pilot to a space beyond the terminal where a state limousine could pull up. The gangway wasn’t in position when the door opened, and with the crush of reporters on the plane trying to get in front of him, Fuchs almost fell out.
Once the stairs were in place, Fuchs descended to the tarmac with a gray overcoat over his arm and a small bag clutched in his hand. A tall young man and a middle-aged woman walked up to him, their faces beaming. His nephew Klaus gave him a hug; the government official and old friend Grete Keilson handed him a bouquet of red carnations. In just over a minute, the three were in the back of the black ZIS heading south, customs and immigrations formalities not required. After all, Klaus had no passport; he was a stateless person.
All the same, Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (the SED) and effectively the country’s president, had personally supervised to ensure Klaus’s safe arrival. The KGB had warned, “It is possible that the English and Americans are making efforts to keep [Fuchs] from leaving England for the GDR, and it is even possible that they are arranging to have him abducted.”
The only threat evident at the moment was from reporters, who jumped into their cars and sped along behind. The driver of the limousine took a dirt road through the woods until the cars trailing began to fall away. When a railroad crossing barrier forced the driver to stop, the occupant of the only car to have hung on got out and knocked on the window of the limousine to ask for an interview. Klaus told Reuters’ East German bureau chief and sole reporter Peter Johnson that he could visit him in the next day or two.
The limo then headed to the modest summerhouse in the resort town of Wandlitz, just north of Berlin, where eighty-five-year-old Emil was waiting, just as he had waited for years.
Reuters’ Peter Johnson had heard that Emil had a house in Wandlitz on Karl-Marx-Strasse, and on the morning of the twenty-third he drove by. He went again that night around 10:00 to make sure Klaus was there and returned the next morning at 8:00. A woman came out when he rang the bell. She told him that Klaus was still sleeping. Shortly, Klaus came out wearing the same brown suit he had worn on the plane, and they spoke through the fence. He apologized to Peter for not opening it, but he didn’t have the key.
Klaus, maintaining his usual polite and friendly demeanor, told Johnson that he planned to become an East German citizen, which he did a few days later. When Johnson pushed him, he admitted that he was a Marxist. At the end of their chat, Johnson asked, “Why did you pass the atomic secrets to Russia?” With a slight smile, Klaus answered that he didn’t wish to say.
Johnson called at Wandlitz again the next day at lunchtime for another scoop. This time the gate was open, and Klaus invited him to join them for a dessert of strained apple puree. Johnson gave Klaus a copy of The Times from the previous day, Wednesday, June 24, 1959, with articles describing his departure from London, and snapped an iconic picture of Klaus reading it, sitting on a chair next to a white trellis, legs crossed and his face wearing a somewhat curious expression.
* * *
—
Klaus had arrived in a city and country filled with cold war tensions and unmet needs, including housing, certain food staples, and fuel. Nonetheless, leaders were proud of the progress since the war, given the nearly complete destruction of Berlin. On the ride to Wandlitz the driver had detoured through East Berlin on streets near Alexanderplatz for Klaus to see the new socialist construction.
Its counterpart, West Berlin, was a sliver of land in the eastern side of Germany divided up and controlled by the Americ
ans, British, and French in their individual sectors, but Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, wanted Berlin to be whole and wholly his. The western sectors had no direct land link to the Federal Republic of Germany, and earlier Stalin had tried starving the West Berliners out. In 1948 and 1949, with the Berlin airlift, the United States shipped in tons of food and coal to defeat that strategy, but failure did not decrease Russia’s fixation. West Berlin’s rising prosperity, which lured East Berlin citizens to cross the boundary in droves, made the obsession more intense. In 1958, Khrushchev searched for another solution to stop the bleeding. A year of talks between the Americans and the Russians produced no results.
It was an unusual backdrop against which to establish a “normal” life, the first such opportunity for Klaus since 1930, when he took the train from Eisenach to Leipzig to study mathematics and, as it turned out, to become a resister to fascism. Much later, his four years at Harwell seemed normal, but his conflicts and contradictions roiled inside.
As with most transitions in Klaus’s life, this one rolled out quietly and quickly. He simply settled in and got on with what was expected of him. No complaints, no drama, no joy or suffering shared.
His mailbox filled with greetings from his old Free Socialist Student Group in Kiel; his math teacher in Eisenach, Dr. Erich Koch; repatriated friends he had seen in London at the Free German League of Culture events; even a couple of former inmates from Wakefield prison reporting on their lives and thanking him for his good counsel and the education he gave them there. At least initially, there were no messages from former friends in Britain.
In the coming years, a few notes of good wishes arrived irregularly from Max and Hedi Born and from Nevill Mott. In 1979, the East German Academy of Science invited Mott to lecture in Leipzig and Halle. Fuchs was invited but chose not to attend. Mott was relieved, writing in his memoir, “I could not have embraced my long-lost pupil with ‘all is forgiven,’ neither could I have shown any hostility to a man who had done what he thought right and suffered for it.”
Other requests were equally tied to the past: a letter from Jim Skardon’s son asking for information for a biography of his father, one from a lawyer for the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg asking for an interview, and one from the brilliant mathematician John Nash asking for help in getting an East German visa and passport. There is no indication whether Fuchs responded to the last three or not. He did send a package to Wakefield prison and received a thank-you note from its “Tutor Organization” for his gift of books to the German Club, of which he had been a member. Requests for interviews from reporters, authors, and movie producers kept him in contact with the West.
He relived memories with old friends too—as reported by Nitschke, the limousine driver who had met him at the airport and continued to drive him around. An employee of the Stasi (the East German secret police), he was a precaution against abduction or assault and one of its informants on him. One day, Nitschke drove Klaus to visit a woman who fought with him against the Nazis in Kiel. She had lived through a two-year imprisonment and severe beatings and carried the scars from injuries that forced her to walk with two canes. Another day, Nitschke brought the Fuchs family’s old friend Arthur Rackwitz to Wandlitz from West Berlin. After hiding Klaus, Gerhard, and others in Berlin’s underground, Rackwitz had been arrested in 1944 and survived, barely, in the Dachau concentration camp.
* * *
—
But a new world immediately sprang up as well. After spending eight days with his father in Wandlitz, Klaus and Nitschke traveled to Dresden-Rossendorf and the ZfK, the Central Institute for Nuclear Physics, an institution with more than eight hundred employees, mostly scientists and engineers. His stay included tours, discussions with scientists, and a hotel reception—the subtext being a kind of job interview.
Nitschke, impressed with Klaus’s humble and simple nature in spite of his “bourgeois origins,” became a confidant during this period. Klaus was open about his concerns at the ZfK—that the scientists and students there “have no purposeful work in mind and are experimenting haphazardly without it.” As someone being considered as a potential deputy director, Klaus didn’t know if he could accomplish the changes needed. To decide, he wanted a discussion with First Secretary Walter Ulbricht.
Having been Jürgen Kuczynski’s contact in Moscow during the 1940s, Ulbricht was well acquainted with Klaus’s story, and a meeting between the two took place in Berlin. Here in the East, the cloud over Fuchs’s reputation wasn’t spying but his confession and possible identification of agents. He admitted frankly to Ulbricht that he had made mistakes, an acknowledgment that Ulbricht accepted. He gave Klaus his support, and as a first step the SED leadership appointed Klaus deputy director of the ZfK, presumably with assurances that he would have the resources for his work. As a second option, he also extended an invitation from the KGB to live and work in Russia, which Klaus declined.
In 1959, the director of the three-year-old ZfK was Heinz Barwich, whose personal interest was nuclear reactors, as was Fuchs’s. In a meeting with the chair of the scientific council in August, Barwich asserted his rights as director and refused to have Fuchs as his deputy director, or to decrease his own role in developing reactors, or to have Fuchs in an independent role at the institute. Barwich wanted Fuchs to create a theoretical department squarely under his control.
Displeased with this response, the chairman of the scientific council strongly suggested that Barwich take a few days to think it over, and after the few days Barwich complied with the council’s wishes. Fuchs’s positions as deputy director of the institute and head of a theoretical division (that was independent) were announced on September 1, 1959. He also soon became a professor at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden.
* * *
—
Émigrés to East Germany were regarded cautiously by those who had escaped to the East rather than the West, the latter often considered tainted by liberal democratic ideals. Some of these Westemigranten, though, had successfully navigated treacherous political chasms and become trusted and powerful members in the SED. Their shared history in Britain—refugee status, internment, KPD activities—together with a similar worldview had created a bond that they honored. Enough of them gave support to Klaus—not only an émigré, but one who had confessed—to make a difference.
Klaus had another important backer as well, Grete Keilson. From his arrival, he and Grete, a widow for six years, saw a lot of each other. Nitschke would frequently drop him off at Grete’s in the evening and fetch him the next day to travel back to Wandlitz. Klaus had been enamored of Grete in Paris and, according to Christel, never quite left the feelings behind. At the beginning of Klaus’s stay in Bristol, he had sent her amusing letters. She had not passed up the opportunity to send him the “Hello from Margot” via young Klaus when he visited his uncle in prison in 1956.
Now in a high position in the SED as well as an assistant director in the Foreign Office, Grete had a deep history with the German Communist Party, having signed on as a teenager. Before the Nazi power grab, she was secretary to Georgi Dimitrov, the leader of the Comintern in Germany later arrested for complicity in the Reichstag fire. She escaped to Prague and then Paris to organize, with Klaus’s help, the peace conferences in 1933. She stayed there to evaluate the situation in Germany and report to Moscow. In 1939, she went to Moscow and worked with Dimitrov and Ulbricht in the Comintern.
This was Stalin’s Russia, and after the war he wanted to liquidate anyone who had operated outside Russia. One day, Grete sat at a meeting and watched as comrades were ushered out, never seen again. With blood pulsing, she waited to see if she would be next. The terror of the moment lasted for the rest of her life.
Klaus and Grete were opposites—she “arrived,” whereas he blended in—that complemented each other well. Her outgoing personality allowed his reserved one to sit back and observe. In fact, she had many traits simila
r to Erna Skinner. Like Erna, she was a few years older than Klaus, smart and chatty, and she liked to take charge, especially in organizing their social life. Unlike Erna, she dressed elegantly and took care with her appearance. Klaus was, at best, a gray-suit-and-white-shirt man and, when anxious, a bit disheveled.
Whether for physical, mental, or ideological reasons or all of them, Klaus took a short break from his new life and underwent a checkup at a health spa at the government’s request. His comments to Nitschke indicated irritation at the stay. Once back, he and Grete sat down with Emil and told him of their plans to marry. Then at Klaus’s request, the government provided him with three weeks at another health spa, this one in the Thuringian Forest near Eisenach. Reports from Nitschke indicated all sounded well.
Their wedding on September 9—the groom was forty-seven, the bride fifty-three—was a simple, nonreligious ceremony followed by a small dinner at the Hotel Johannishof in central Berlin and a party at the summerhouse in Wandlitz. It was just family, Emil and young Klaus, and a few friends, two of whom were members of the Central Committee of the SED. By the end of September, the new Fuchs family had moved to Dresden, Klaus began work at the ZfK, and a routine developed that included guests from the institute and lecturers who came from Russia. They seemed happy from the start.
In three months, Klaus transformed thirty years of delayed opportunity into life in full bloom: a wife, a high-level job, an apartment in the city, a large weekend house, a car, and an application to become an SED party member that was quickly accepted. A professorship at a university would follow, all arranged by the East German government. A letter to the local party secretary in Dresden from Kurt Hager, the East German secretary responsible for science and a fellow British émigré and internee with Klaus, directed:
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