Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Thorndike Greenspan is the author of The End of the Certain World and the co-author of four books with her late husband, child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Chapter 1

Beginnings, Leipzig 1930

Who was this Klaus Fuchs? Communist. Physicist. Potential spy. What motivated him? Where did this amalgam of technical genius and ideology come from?

The last of those questions is the only one with a direct if simplistic answer. Klaus Fuchs came from Eisenach, Germany, a small town that pulsed with eight hundred years of history and culture. High above the Market Square that young Klaus crossed daily on his way to school was the Wartburg, an eleventh-century fortification. A symbol of protection and stability on a 1,350-foot rocky prominence, it had been Martin Luther's refuge from Charles V in 1521, when he translated the New Testament into German. In the center of the town was the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Klaus's own birth, on December 29, 1911, was actually in RŸsselsheim, just south of Frankfurt, where his father, Emil, was the rector of the redbrick Lutheran church in the middle of town. From the family's thatched-roof cottage, Emil penned his weekly sermons as well as articles for its Evangelical Community Newsletter. On March 3, 1918, with the world war in its third year, he wrote one thanking God for Germany's new treaty with Russia that removed the Eastern threat. He awaited the collapse of England-a "robber nation," he called it-so that a free Germany with "a spiritual life of such power and purity, a state life of such justice," could emerge to create world peace. Like many Germans, he was still optimistic that the long war would soon end, with Germany victorious.

That summer, as fresh troops from America joined the battle and the Allies began turning back the last German offensives, the family moved to Eisenach. The church had assigned Emil a working-class parish drawn from the automobile industry there. He rented a house high on a hill overlooking the city-close to the Wartburg-with a garden and enough space for their goats.

Despite the humiliation of Germany's surrender six weeks before Klaus's seventh birthday, the kaiser's abdication, and the political and economic chaos that followed, the family still managed to enjoy their new home. The children celebrated holidays with friends; Emil wrote a play they performed at Christmas; little Klaus made a gizmo from a small piece of wood and gave a "serious" lesson to his class on his technique.

Klaus and his sister Kristel, two years younger, grew into playmates, exploring a fantasy world from a big gall at the base of a backyard tree that transformed into a horse (for her) or a camel (for him) and, on a sunny afternoon, offered a ride of imagination across the countryside. In quiet hours, he taught her to read. She watched as he built mazes and running wheels for his pet mice. His concern for animals led him to become a dedicated vegetarian at an early age. At twelve, he became so seriously anemic that his parents sent him to a clinic in Switzerland for a cure.

Emil transferred his older son, Gerhard, to the Odenwaldschule in August 1923. A sylvan oasis that combined theology, socialism, and educational reform, the boarding school was founded by an imposing tall, slim man with a full black beard and intense, deep-set piercing eyes named Paul Geheeb. Over time Geheeb and his wife became close to the whole Fuchs family, who one by one or in pairs escaped there for rest and recovery-especially Emil, who often sought respite from general life. Klaus loved his visits.

"But little by little," as Emil recalled, "political developments cast their shadows over cheerful work and family life."

All over Germany, angry and unemployed veterans rallied and sometimes rioted in the streets, protesting the ineffectual, socialist government that had replaced the empire and the supposed "stab in the back" by Jews and communists that the right wing said accounted for Germany's defeat, and after such sacrifice!

German soldiers had drowned in the mud and blood of the trenches, while civilians had suffered extreme privations. Especially during the so-called Turnip Winter of 1916-17, when there was little else to eat, Germans had made ersatz "coffee" out of tree bark and joked that they were forced to eat ersatz cats and mice. The Quakers set up feeding stations for the severely malnourished children. Emil wandered dead tired in villages, going to friends of a cousin to buy food for his family. He kept them fed, but he could do little about the lack of heating fuel during the bitter cold.

After Germany's humiliating surrender, the Allies' blockade continued in order to extend the suffering and force harsh treaty terms, including the payment of reparations that crippled the economy. The French occupied the Ruhr to carry off German coal, and then came three years of dizzying inflation: 1 million marks for a loaf of bread until the next week, when the price doubled or tripled, finally hitting 200 billion marks.

Paying the tuition for Gerhard at the Odenwaldschule worried Emil. A friend in London sent him five pounds-a windfall given the exchange rate-and rescued him financially. It allowed Emil to send twenty-five million marks as partial tuition payment. He ruminated, "But what is so much German money beside the five pounds? One feels how poor we have become."

Emil sermonized about spiritual life but lived a political one, which could be dangerous, especially in the unsettled days of GermanyÕs first experiment with democracy, the Weimar Republic. The foreign minister was murdered, as were leftist leaders, and anyone such as Emil who was sympathetic to workersÕ rights was automatically a ÒredÓ and treated accordingly.

Lutheran ministers were a conservative lot, and Emil was one of the few to join the moderate left-wing Social Democrats, the largest political party in Germany. The local newspapers regularly published his opinions and letters-as well as others' dissents-as he pursued his passion for the rights of the working class.

Emil brewed his first political storm in the early 1920s with an article that condemned the murder of fifteen workers-supposed communists-by university students in a right-wing paramilitary group. As Emil later said, "the bourgeois world of Eisenach" was "completely inflamed." The local church council voted to remove him from his parish. His parishioners gathered three thousand signatures to save him.

The strength of Emil's convictions arose from his fundamental belief in God. For him, "the existing theology stood too far from practical life and life's need of men." In 1894, he had heard a liberal Lutheran minister lecture on the responsibility of religion to reach out to the working poor. He immediately rejected the conservative principles of his father, also a Lutheran minister, and four siblings. Throughout all the crises during the tumultuous era in which he lived, Emil exercised his ideals through this religiosity-something none of his children ever professed. He never looked back even in the face of desperation.

Emil's notoriety fell on his children. When the mother next door learned the family's politics, she forbade her children to play with them. Teachers, nervous from the political mood, lacked the will to protect them.

Of the four Fuchs children, Elisabeth, the oldest, was the least affected. She left for the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 1926. Gerhard, two years younger, and Kristel freely voiced their opinions and were hounded the most. Before transferring to the Odenwaldschule, Gerhard had stuck up for a Jewish boy bullied by a school gang. Emil found out that they were going after Gerhard too when the postman, stopping at the garden...