Norman Moss - Klaus Fuchs - The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb

Mott was only a little older than the young men working under him, and he was on personal terms with all of them, but he knew almost nothing about Fuchs’s background or family. He used to go on long walks in the Mendip Hills with some of his students on Sundays, and Fuchs went along on a few of these, but he walked in silence. His contemporaries at Bristol remember him as an industrious, very talented, very serious young man who talked very little and hardly ever smiled.

Although Fuchs held back from political discussions, Mott persuaded him to come along with him to a few meetings of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. Some of these meetings were devoted to the Moscow treason trials then in progress, at which stalwart leaders of the 1917 Revolution were reduced to puppets, confessing abjectly to preposterous charges that they were Trotskyite agents planning sabotage and assassination at the behest of Western imperialists and Nazi Germany. Most of those attending the meeting wanted to believe that the trials were honest, or at least that there was some honest purpose behind them. Sometimes, in order to achieve a better understanding of what went on in the courtroom, they would act out episodes from the trials.

Fuchs joined in one of these enactments, taking the part of the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky. Mott was surprised to see a new Fuchs: no longer quiet and subdued, he hurled Vyshinsky’s denunciations about fiercely. For a few moments, and wearing another’s identity, he could reveal his deeply held beliefs.

If he had expressed them more directly, they would have been received sympathetically, all the more so as he had suffered for them at Nazi hands. Many British intellectuals at the time felt goodwill towards Communism, and towards the Soviet Union as a nation that, whatever its faults, was struggling to build a better kind of society, for the Revolution was only twenty years old, in the face of hostility in the capitalist world. Communism was seen widely not as an alternative to democracy but as a new and perhaps richer version of it. Philosophically, it shares the same values as liberal democracy. [3] See, for instance, the important book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy by J. L. Talmon. Talmon argues that the fundamental political conflict in our time is between liberal and what he calls totalitarian democracy. Stephen Spender’s now-forgotten book about Communism, published in 1937, was called Forward from Liberalism. In contrast to the Western democracies — unjust, class-ridden, economically stagnant, half-hearted in their opposition to fascism abroad, particularly in Spain — Russia seemed to be the future that worked, and deserved to work.

The Spanish Civil War dominated political conversation from 1936 onwards, just as the Vietnam War dominated political conversation in the 1960s, and it aroused emotions that were just as strong. The Soviet Union was the only major power to send help to the Spanish Republican side, and Communist Parties around the world supported its cause vigorously.

There was nothing in Fuchs’s intellectual environment at this time to challenge the views he held privately; rather, it supported them. This was important in his development.

He did not break entirely with his past. For one thing, he exchanged letters with his father, right up until the outbreak of war. These letters were guarded, but through them, and later through letters from his brother and sister when these had left Germany, he kept in touch with what was happening to his family, although he did not talk about it to anyone in Bristol.

His father Emil was arrested in 1933 for speaking out against the Nazi regime. He was held in prison for a month, and then released on bail, which was put up by a Quaker friend. His trial was delayed for two years. When it came, he appeared before a People’s Court, and was unrepentant in his views. However, the regime did not want to offend religious groups any more than necessary, particularly those with strong international connections — a British Quaker was present at his trial. He was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and, as he had already spent a month in prison, he was released immediately.

Gerhardt, the elder son, went to Switzerland and entered a sanatorium where he was treated for tuberculosis. Fuchs went to see him there, his one trip abroad during these years.

His sister Elizabeth had a friend who was also a Communist, Gustav Kittowsky. In 1935 they started a car hire business, and Emil moved to Berlin and joined them in this venture. Elizabeth and Kittowsky married and had a baby son, whom they called Klaus. Kittowsky used to drive abroad, and he used these trips to smuggle Communists out of the country. In 1938 he was caught and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, in a jail in Brandenburg, a Berlin suburb. Elizabeth and Emil used to visit him there, taking little Klaus along.

Kittowsky escaped from prison. He made an arrangement to meet Elizabeth in secret, but did not keep the rendezvous. Then he sent a postcard from Prague. Elizabeth went to live with her father, along with her child. When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, in March 1939, she became frantic with worry about Kittowsky’s fate (in fact, he survived the war). In August of that year, Emil went to a Quaker conference in Bad Pyrmont, a journey of several hours by train, and he took Elizabeth with him. She seemed so depressed that he became worried, and decided to take her to a doctor when they got back to Berlin. But on the journey back, when he left their compartment for a few moments, she threw herself out. Other passengers pulled the emergency cord, but she was found dead beside the track. He was left with little Klaus, whom he raised by himself.

Fuchs’s younger sister, Kristel, had been at a teacher-training college when the Nazis came to power. She went to Switzerland and worked at several jobs there, then went back to Germany and got her teacher’s diploma. In 1936 she emigrated to America, and went to Swarthmore College for a time. She travelled by way of England, and had a brief reunion with her brother.

As well as keeping in touch with his family, Fuchs also made contact, after some time, with the German Communist Party, in the person of Jurgen Kuczynski, whom he had probably met in Berlin. Kuczynski was a German Communist of Polish parentage, a few years older than Fuchs, who came to Britain in 1936 and organized German Communist refugees in a number of ‘free German’ societies. Fuchs did not join any of these. He let Kuczynski know that he was in Britain; he registered with him, so to speak, and thus with the Party. He said later that he may have given him a biography of himself; he could not remember.

Although Fuchs probably did not know this, Kuczynski was an agent of the GRU, the overseas intelligence branch of the Soviet Army. He had been recruited while on a visit to Moscow. He was thus a member of that international army of volunteers who had enlisted in the 1920s and 1930s to serve in secret the cause of world revolution. His sister Ruth was another. They joined at a time when it was much easier than it is now to believe in this revolution, and to believe that it was for the betterment of humanity, and to believe also that it was best advanced by serving the interests of the Soviet state. Some, like Kuczynski, were openly Communist Party members, while serving also as Soviet intelligence agents. Others had no overt connection with Communism, and served either as spies or as agents of influence. This invisible army became visible only occasionally, with an arrest, such as that of the Belgian who inveigled his way into Trotsky’s entourage in Mexico and stabbed him to death, or of the Krogers, the American couple living in London who were part of a spy ring, or an occasional defection, such as that of the Briton Alexander Foote, who worked with both Kuczynski and his sister in Switzerland.