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

But this is not what he did. We can trace through Fuchs’s own words the path that led away from his belief in Communism and his service in its cause. The path that took him back to Communism and service to the Communist Party once again, and to East Germany, is buried out of sight.

It may be important that he never worked out his regret for what he had done and his distaste for the state of mind that had inspired him in political terms. The nearest he got was a rejection of all political ideology: ‘Blame me, and if you can’t do that, blame Hitler and Karl Marx and Stalin and all their blasted company,’ he had written to Arnold. For someone who is not ready for despairing resignation or the detachment of a Candide, and who needs a coherent view of society, ‘a plague on all your houses’ is not a satisfactory stance. It may be relevant that his father came and visited him twice in prison in Britain, and told him that he would like him to come to East Germany, and he would be allowed to do so. Also, he may have felt suddenly the need for a homeland.

Under British prison regulations, a prisoner who does not get into any trouble in prison or offend against the regulations is entitled to remission of one-third of his sentence for good conduct. Fuchs satisfied these conditions, and so he served only nine years and four months.

Shortly before his sentence came to an end, Peierls wrote to him offering to help him find a job in England, but he received no reply. Arnold visited him in Wakefield, at the request of MI5, and offered to help him sort out any financial affairs. Fuchs told him how hurt he was at being deprived of his British citizenship. He said he would have liked to remain in England, but now he would probably go to East Germany. He said he was still a confirmed Marxist. He said he thought that in East Germany, government officials often attained their positions because of their standing in the Communist Party rather than their ability, and this was wrong. He wanted the intelligentsia to have more voice in Government affairs in East Germany, and he wanted to lead a campaign to ensure that they did. This was the old Fuchs, who was going to tell the Soviet leaders what was wrong with their system.

Fuchs left Wakefield Prison on 23 June 1959. The prison authorities and the police are permitted, in exceptional circumstances, to facilitate a prisoner’s journey to wherever he wants to go to start a new life. A police car drove Fuchs straight from prison to Heathrow Airport, where he boarded a Polish airliner for East Berlin. An Associated Press reporter got on the plane. Fuchs told him: ‘I wish to say that I bear no resentment against Britain or any Western country for what has happened.’ Again, this sounded like the old Fuchs, and the old arrogance. He felt that it was for him to display or dispense with resentment.

He was met at the airport in East Berlin by Klaus Kittowsky, who was now a university student, and they drove together to see his father. Then he went to a health resort for a rest. He had money in the bank in England, which he presumably transferred.

Fuchs was not a Philby or a Maclean, a spy coming in from the cold. His world was that of science, and this was the world to which he returned. He was offered, and accepted, the post of Deputy Director of the Institute of Nuclear Research at Rossendorf, a small town in pleasant wooded countryside near Dresden. He was also to lecture at the Akademie der Wissenschaften, an academic institute in Dresden.

He applied for membership in the German Communist Party, and was accepted. He married now, a woman who had been a student at Kiel University with him, Margaret Keilson. She also was a Communist Party member. Despite this apparent orthodoxy, it is noteworthy that although Fuchs has often travelled to other countries in the Communist bloc since he went to East Germany, he has never travelled to any country outside the bloc. Presumably, the authorities do not trust him sufficiently to allow him to go.

He did not contact any of his former friends in Britain or America. He wrote once to a former colleague at Harwell who was junior to him, Brian Flowers (now Lord Flowers), inviting him to a scientific conference he was organizing. It was a formal letter that did not acknowledge in any way that they had been acquainted: he addressed Flowers, whom he had always known as ‘Brian’, as ‘Dr Flowers’. Flowers wrote back a brief letter addressed to ‘Dear Klaus’ and turning down the invitation. However, Fuchs did write to Gordon Hawkins, the assistant governor of Wakefield Prison, telling him: ‘The conversations I had with you — in particular the philosophical ones — belong to the pleasant memories of my time at Wakefield.’

(Odd that he should have pleasant memories of Wakefield gaol.)

Soon after Fuchs went to East Germany, Nicholas Kurd found himself in West Berlin. He noticed that there was a conference in East Berlin which he thought Fuchs would probably be attending, ascertained that he would be there, and telephoned him; Fuchs suggested lunch, and Kurd crossed the Wall to meet him.

Fuchs told him over lunch that he was upset by the attitude of his friends in England; he thought they might have been more sympathetic. He said he knew how they felt, he understood that what he had done was wrong from their points of view, but there were mitigating circumstances, and they might have been more understanding of his point of view. He said the one person who had remained a good friend throughout his difficult times was Henry Arnold, and he asked to be remembered to him.

They touched on politics only once. Kurd said he had been reading the East German newspapers, and found them so narrowly one-sided in their view of events that they made the British Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, seem like an organ of liberal opinion by comparison. Fuchs laughed at this and nodded sympathetically, but said that the Government in East Germany was trying to change society, and this was not easy.

The Director of the Institute for Nuclear Research was Heinz Barwich, a German physicist with pro-Soviet sympathies who had gone to the Soviet Union after the war and worked on the Soviet atomic bomb programme, and earned a Stalin Prize. At the Institute, Barwich had his difficulties with the Communist Party. A party bureaucrat was installed at the Institute and interfered with the way it was run, until Barwich found the situation intolerable and demanded his removal; after a struggle, he got it. When he learned that Fuchs was to join the Institute as his deputy, he looked forward to having at his side a man who, as he saw it, had already shown great moral courage and independence. He assumed that Fuchs would be an ally in any future struggles with the bureaucracy. But he was disappointed; he found that Fuchs followed the Party line on everything dogmatically, and never differed from its dictates or its officials.

Barwich became disillusioned with Communism, and in 1964 he defected to the West while he was attending a scientific conference in Geneva. Later, he testified before a US congressional committee about the Soviet atomic bomb programme, and said that Fuchs, by his help, had probably saved the Russians two years’ work.

On Fuchs’s behaviour in East Germany, he recalled Fuchs’s self-analytical confession that was read out at his trial, and the passages about dividing his mind into two compartments. He said that as he saw it, Fuchs had evidently decided to put an end to the split in his personality, and deliver himself totally to the service of Communism.

Certainly Fuchs had become, in his public persona at least, a dogmatically faithful Communist, following the party line on every issue, a transformation wrought by some combination of political reconversion, self-delusion and perhaps opportunism, for he had to live in East Germany and pursue his career there. He occasionally gave interviews to the official media supporting the official Soviet line on some issue of the day concerning nuclear weapons. When the Soviet Union ended its moratorium on nuclear weapons testing in 1961, he told the East German news agency that this was a correct and necessary step. In his only interview with a British newspaper, the Daily Express, he accused West Germany of setting out to build an atomic bomb.