Arriving at the port of Folkestone, twenty-one-year-old Klaus Fuchs descended the gangplank and entered the two-story Italianate customhouse, one of thirty-one hundred German refugees to enter Britain that year. When the immigration officer questioned him as to his reason for entry, he handed him a letter that outlined an offer to study theoretical physics at the University of Bristol. It detailed free board and room from his sponsor Ronald Gunn, as well as payment of university fees by his father.
Despite being “white-faced, half-starved and with a dirty bag of linen,” Klaus was deemed a refugee of “good class,” and the officer granted him a landing permit with triple conditions: no employment without government permission, a time limit of three months, and registration as an alien in Bristol.
Permit in hand, Klaus followed the hall to the back of the building and climbed onto the train to London. There he changed to one heading southwest to Bristol, an industrial city of about 350,000 on the banks of the river Avon. The photograph on Klaus’s registration card stamped two weeks later in Somerset shows him wearing a serious expression and a roomy suit jacket, still pale and thin, but he could breathe in freedom. He could also continue his work in opposition to the Nazi regime. Shortly thereafter, he made contact with KPD émigrés in London.
Ronald Gunn, his sponsor, had easily obtained the letter that Klaus presented at the customs office. Although official forms listed Gunn’s occupation as a commercial clerk at the Imperial Tobacco Company, this prosaic description obscured family ties and inherited wealth. He was the great-great-grandson of Henry Overton Wills I, who had co-founded Imperial Tobacco, the largest of its kind in Britain. Gunn’s cousin Henry H. Wills had endowed the eponymous, state-of-the-art physics laboratory. Set high upon one of Bristol’s many hills, its crenelated tower beckoned scientists, whether esteemed or striving.
The difference in the social stratum between Klaus and the Gunns didn’t preclude a kinship. Jessie Gunn, Ronald’s wife, was a Quaker and shared several acquaintances with Emil Fuchs in the British Society of Friends. Ronald was at least a communist sympathizer and had traveled with Jessie to Russia in 1932. His and Klaus’s worldviews encompassed the same attitude toward social problems and found solutions in the Russian socialist system.
Klaus’s academic life began almost overnight when Gunn brought him to the physics department to meet its new director, Nevill Mott. Mott was twenty-eight, energetic, and an exceptionally capable scientist, having studied the mysteries of quantum physics with Max Born in Göttingen, Germany. Consequently, he spoke German, which was most helpful to Klaus, who spoke no English.
Klaus wanted to finish his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, but Bristol didn’t offer such a concentration, so he shifted to physics. Given the mathematical foundations of general relativity and quantum theory, it wasn’t a great leap. The real challenge was absorbing information from lectures given in English. After a frustrated Klaus attended a few, Mott suggested that he earn his “B.Sc. by research,” not course work. He rapidly advanced to a PhD.
Events in Germany had kept Klaus from math and science for the past year, but as Mott’s assistant he dived in and, in 1935, published his first article, “A Quantum Mechanical Investigation of Cohesive Forces of Metallic Copper Metals,” in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. The research reflected Mott’s interest in the properties of metals, for which he later won a Nobel Prize.
It was with another article written a year later that Fuchs made his first major mark in research. This work, which changed the fundamental understanding of the electrical conductivity of thin metallic film, served as a foundation for the development of microelectronics after the war. The results of the work—continually cited to this day—couldn’t be fully appreciated in 1936, but Fuchs’s singular intellectual abilities could.
Klaus received letters from home but few details. The Nazis controlled the information flow, causing one family friend to warn another, “Be careful what you write to Emil in Germany.”
In the spring of 1934, the Gunns invited Klaus to go with them on a month’s holiday to France and Switzerland. For Klaus, it became an opportunity to see Gerhard, whose underground work had moved from organizing students in Berlin to liaising with party officials in Paris and organizing émigré resistance in Prague. Gerhard had become adept at slipping over various borders and easily met up with Klaus. He shared the woes. Gerhard, Emil, Elisabeth, and her boyfriend, Guschi, lived together poverty-stricken in Berlin. Gerhard looked for a carpentry job, Guschi, for one as a locksmith, but his time in prison blocked opportunities. Elisabeth’s art flourished but earned no money. Shares of IG Farben inherited from Emil’s father-in-law offered some promise. With them, Gerhard and Guschi hoped to buy a couple of cars for a rental business and a taxi service, which they eventually did.
His children’s desire for a business relieved Emil. He assumed they had left their perilous underground life. They were just as committed though. Emil was the odd man out. Early on, the family had agreed to share only as much as was necessary. His children had no need to share with each other. The underground wove their lives and secrets together. They told him little, in part not to worry him and in part because he tended to speak loosely.
Kristel was the only one seemingly out of harm’s way. The government had granted her a visa for Switzerland to study psychology. Because of their prison sentences, Emil, Elisabeth, and Guschi had lost their passports and were trapped in Germany.
Gerhard’s news for Klaus offered little optimism, although Emil never lost hope. He persistently applied to the German government for a passport to go to Britain or the United States.
It was fortunate that Klaus made the trip with the Gunns in the spring. His German passport expired in June, and after a back-and-forth with the German consul in Bristol, he learned that the German government would not renew it. Instead, it offered him a one-way temporary pass to travel home. As a political refugee from Nazi oppression, he knew this option was meaningless. Returning meant certain arrest and torture—maybe death.
In October 1934, Klaus’s stateless condition became a crisis. Refugees could not stay in England without Documents of Identity. The government issued them only for travel outside the country, not for residence within it. Without either a passport or these documents, he had to return to Germany.
Despondent, Klaus waited for deportation orders, but the angels of good fortune struck again. After four days, the Home Office offered a reprieve: Registering with the police would be sufficient, although there was a complication. To reregister required permission from the Home Office, and it needed an official ID paper such as his expired German passport. Klaus had sent this document to the German consul. He wrote and asked to have it sent back to him, and surprisingly the German consul complied without ado. By year’s end, Klaus received his registration card, a welcomed Christmas present. The only restriction was foreign travel, which required permission.
Unknown to Klaus, the police president in Kiel, with whom he was well acquainted, had sent information on Klaus’s life there to the German consul, and it reached the chief constable in Bristol. The chief constable relayed it to MI5 with a note summarily categorizing Klaus as “a notorious Communist” but also stating that he was “not known to have engaged in any Communist activity” in Bristol. In a routine gesture that would have much greater significance years later, MI5 opened a security file on him.
Contrary to the chief constable’s belief, Klaus was engaging in communist activity in Bristol, although quietly. Students and faculty often gathered to discuss politics, and the majority view was far to the left. Klaus didn’t participate, but he did leave propaganda pamphlets around the department. He also belonged to the university’s Socialist Society. Its chair later described admiringly how at one meeting Klaus had a slip of paper with a message from “a Continental socialist” predicting a verdict in the trial on the Reichstag fire. A couple of days later, a main defendant, Georgi Dimitrov, was released. The chairman figured that Klaus had very good sources. He did. There was a small British network—émigré friends from the Berlin underground—and he was a part of it.
Otherwise, Klaus wasn’t so different from many of his fellow students and faculty members. With Hitler and Mussolini ascending and with fascist stirrings in Spain, the youth especially reacted against a world tilting to evil. Bread lines, unemployment, and persistent economic anxiety lured tens of thousands to the ideals of communism. People simply wanted basic security with food, shelter, and education, something better than what they saw as the capitalist misery that robbed them relentlessly. Studying Marx and Lenin—an opportunity Klaus took in Bristol—was not extraordinary, as was obvious from a new endeavor.
In 1934, Klaus helped Ronald Gunn start a branch of the Society for Cultural Relations Between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the U.S.S.R., more succinctly the SCR. Gunn was chairman; its secretary was the wife of Ronald Gurney, a lecturer in the physics department. Although Klaus was never an official member, he regularly went to meetings. With 110 members (one of the more active branches) its inaugural year was sufficiently successful to receive praise in the SCR’s annual report. Nevill Mott was listed among the 110. Gunn often held meetings at his new “concrete House,” a marvel of engineering and something that drew neighbors’ interest.
The SCR grew out of august origins. Virginia Woolf was a co-founder in 1924; John Maynard Keynes was its chair in 1936. Its list of vice presidents was a who’s who of British intelligentsia, the likes of E. M. Forster, the dean of Canterbury, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell. The future Nobel physicist Patrick Blackett was on the executive committee. Headquartered in Bloomsbury two blocks from the British Museum, the group had thirteen hundred members, excluding branches such as Bristol. Membership offered opportunities to tour Russia—the Leningrad Music Festival, the Moscow Theatre Festival—and tickets to Soviet art exhibits, lectures, and ballet imported to London. The 1934–35 annual report heralded “the great improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations” marked by the visit of Anthony Eden, then an undersecretary in the Foreign Office, to Moscow. It was the first official visit since Lenin seized control of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
MI5 considered the SCR a communist front, although some of its officers thought it “mild” in that it offered a discussion on both sides and was cultural in nature, not political. It exemplified the successful style of the maestro of propaganda Willi Münzenberg (a probable acquaintance of Klaus’s in Paris), the nondoctrinaire sort that created the desire among left-leaning British, such as Nevill Mott, to travel to Russia.
In 1934, Nevill Mott and his wife made the journey, as guests at the Mendeleev Congress in Leningrad. A few years earlier, friends had developed a “gloomy impression” of the Soviet experiment owing to the bad harvests and the problematic five-year economic plan that had caused severe deprivations. But now the Motts saw eager and healthy-looking workers with clothes that were neat and clean, goods available in shops, new paint on the palaces, even better roads. There was every evidence of a good, decent life, and apparently without unemployment—a radical improvement over tsarist days or the chaos and dislocation that had prevailed since the revolution. When Mott asked people about the standard of living, especially the cheaply built housing for workers coming to the new factories, they expressed little concern about the shoddy construction. They all seemed committed to the larger goal, which was “building the Soviet State.”
But Mott also knew that the new Russia displayed to him was hardly a “worker’s paradise.” He asked a guide about kulaks, the prosperous, landowning peasants persecuted for their resistance to collectivization. He wanted to know how many had been banished, and he was told, “Half a million and that wasn’t many was it.” Mott was impressed that this man didn’t cover up the facts. As he later wrote, the guide “wanted to believe in it.” In truth, millions were exiled to Siberia, with thousands simply shot in their villages.
In Leningrad, Mott also saw the physicist Rudi Peierls and his wife, Genia, who lived in a nice, new apartment. It had a beautiful bathroom, but water only in the evenings.
Disagreement over just how much the Soviet reality matched socialist ideals—and how much Stalin’s effort to “build the Soviet State” was an authoritarian betrayal of those ideals—would animate debates among left-wing sympathizers in the West for decades to come. But nonideological progress in physics continued.
By the fall of 1936, only three years after his arrival in Britain, Klaus had finished his undergraduate degree, received approval to do a PhD, and submitted his dissertation, titled “A Quantum Mechanical Investigation of the Cohesive Forces of Copper, the Elastic Constants, and the Specific Heat of Monovalent Metals.” The award of the degree was just a few months away. He had also published three articles in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in addition to his groundbreaking article on electrical conductivity.
Also in 1936, in August, Kristel arrived on her way to Swarthmore, the Quaker college in Pennsylvania where a friend of her father’s had arranged a scholarship. She brought Klaus another update on the family, and again it was not good.
It began with Karin, who had returned to Berlin, married Gerhard, and become an underground recruiter, code-named Johanna, in Gerhard’s student network. In 1935, the Gestapo penetrated the cell, arrested her, and let her suffer for months behind bars without a specific charge. She was pregnant, and very sick throughout her term, eventually giving birth to her son Jürgen in prison. Quakers in London tried to get her out, but couldn’t.
According to the Gestapo report, they arrested Gerhard as well but for some reason released him. Soon after, as he walked down the street, a friend coming toward him signaled that the Gestapo were behind him. Gerhard escaped them, Guschi drove him to Dresden, and he made it over the Czech border. He was now penniless and soon became desperately ill with TB, ending up in a sanatorium. With Gestapo agents in Czechoslovakia stalking émigrés and kidnapping them, communicating with him directly was dangerous, so Emil used back channels to send him funds, selling subscriptions to his interpretation of the Bible in Switzerland and smuggling in copies. The money went into a Swiss fund for Gerhard. Emil knew that if caught, he would be charged with high treason.
Guschi, now Elisabeth’s husband, had been arrested in mid-January 1936. The Gestapo probably would have arrested Elisabeth too, but she was in the hospital, their son, Klauslein, being cared for in a children’s home.
The Gestapo had figured out that the rental car business—four cars and a gas station in Neukölln—Guschi and Gerhard had set up was being used to provide transport for the resistance. Working as a liaison between the underground in Berlin and resources in Denmark, and with Elisabeth and Klauslein in tow, Guschi would bring material to an uncle who lived in a fishing town close to Kiel. From there, the uncle organized the boats that carried literature back and forth to Denmark, a printing haven for the communists.
Guschi and Gerhard also used the cars to transport those fleeing the Nazis—communists, Jews, Social Democrats, anyone hunted—to the border of Czechoslovakia or to the Baltic Sea for transit to Denmark. The Gestapo rolled up the whole operation, then tortured and killed Guschi’s invalid uncle.
Guschi was in prison awaiting sentencing. Karin had been imprisoned for more than a year with no trial; Elisabeth was about to be released from the hospital to the care of Emil’s sister in Zehlendorf. Only Emil was at liberty, living in their Berlin apartment looked after by someone Kristel had hired. He was “closely watched.”
By the beginning of 1937, Mott had three or four German refugees in the department and insufficient funds to keep them all. While Klaus waited to hear how Mott would resolve the situation, he joined a local relief committee organized to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and he attended the SCR, the Russian cultural group. The January 23 front-page headline in the Bristol Evening Post read, “Moscow Trial: 17 Plead Guilty, Charges of Conspiracy with German General Staff; Officials Accused of Anti-Stalin Conspiracy.” This was one of the infamous “show trials” that Stalin used to justify liquidating most of the old-line Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, as well as current members of the army—anyone who might pose a threat as an alternative to his increasingly brutal and unpopular leadership.
The SCR-Bristol branch discussed whether the evidence against the “traitors” was really true. When transcripts of the trials became available, the group decided to reenact them. As in Kiel with the agitprop performances, Klaus played the adversarial role of the vengeful prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky with zeal, as he had done with Hitler. Klaus’s venomous attack on the accused impressed Mott as a clear sign of “where his [Klaus’s] sympathies lay and always remembered it.” He knew nothing of Klaus’s earlier thespian pursuits. In this case, though, Klaus might not have considered Vishinsky a bad guy. Generally, Klaus judged most Western news on Russia as mere propaganda to destroy communism.
Whether the performance was a deciding factor or not, Mott chose not to fund Klaus in Bristol, but he did find him a position at the University of Edinburgh with Max Born, Mott’s former mentor at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He told Born that he was sending Klaus because Klaus “needed a change.” Born later heard that Mott’s real reason was Klaus’s communist activities, a claim Mott denied. Whatever the reason, Mott remained Klaus’s friend and supporter.