Professor Max Born, chair of the department of natural philosophy—as the Scots called theoretical physics—walked to his office on the first morning back from his holiday, the first morning of the fall semester at the University of Edinburgh. He descended the stairs to the basement and strode along the hall of the former University Infirmary, the troughs on either side of the concrete floor a reminder of bodies on pushcarts. Off the hall was his office, a large and dark room that held his desk and chair, a couch, and a circular table and a rectangular one with chairs that had sat depressingly empty for the last year.
Born had come to Edinburgh via a temporary position at the University of Cambridge and a years-long one at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Before the Nazis stripped him of his position, he drew a constellation of young academic superstars from Europe and America. About a dozen would go on to win Nobel prizes, as did Born himself. One, Werner Heisenberg, who would serve prominently in Germany’s effort to build an atomic bomb, had already received the prize for work he and Born had collaborated on.
This morning something new warmed the dampness and cold of the coming bleak winter. At the table Born saw the eager faces of his first two graduate students. Both German PhDs in physics, they were relieved to have secured a position with him. The tall, blond, robust one, Walter Kellermann, the son of a rabbi, was an experimental physicist. The other, Klaus Fuchs, the son of a Lutheran minister, was a theoretician. Born later described Klaus as “weak in appearance but with a powerful brain, taciturn, with a veiled expression which disclosed nothing of his thoughts.” Born’s daughter Irene was softer in her comments but more prosaic, describing him as appearing to need a warm coat and a good meal.
Fuchs was not only a theoretical physicist but one whose fundamentals were rooted in mathematics, as were Born’s. Born and Fuchs came to physics for different reasons, but their path led through the works of such mathematicians as Euclid, Lagrange, and Gauss.
Fuchs and Kellermann, a gift for Born, rescued his scientific soul. Fuchs, especially, lifted a depression that he had carried inside for some time.
At the outset, Born gave them a piece of advice: do not speak German in public. Separately, he told Fuchs to stop all political activity. He wanted none of the communist propaganda that had caused Mott consternation.
Refugee aid organizations had sterner recommendations: no political discussion in public; no description of the plight of Jews in Germany; no talk of the Nazis’ real motives. They didn’t want refugees to be seen as warmongers. Negative feelings toward refugees, and Germans in particular, had already surfaced in Britain.
Max and Hedi Born lived in a row house built entirely of stone, inside and out, that mirrored the city’s stolid facade—short on whimsy, long on steadiness. Born’s home was his favored setting for work, and Klaus joined him there regularly. Throughout the day, as he had with assistants in Göttingen, Born handed an idea to Klaus with a “Machen Sie das” (Do this). At the end of the day, Klaus often stayed for dinner and then played skat, a card game for three. He became part of the family fabric. When Hedi became a Quaker, Klaus did too, although he later remarked that his association was mainly to aid in contact with his father. He was an atheist, and although a pacifist at heart, he willingly joined the communists to drive out the Nazis. In doing so, he embraced their call for revolution.
Once a month or so, Born, an accomplished pianist, gathered together friends who made an informal chamber group. He invited Klaus to be second violin, even though Klaus was self-taught and didn’t play that well. Klaus also played the viola in a quartet with physicists and mathematicians, with Kellermann playing second violin. In both groups, others noted that Klaus routinely lost his place in the music.
Kellermann and Fuchs were much more proficient in their work. They attended math and physics seminars, some given by guest lecturers drawn from Born’s connections in Germany, some from his friends in the German émigré community. They began research projects and did some teaching, though Klaus less so. His German accent, stronger than Walter’s, didn’t resonate well with the Scottish ear. To bolster their credentials and guard against chaotic times, Born told them to apply to the university for a doctorate of science degree. Kellermann didn’t have the required publications to qualify. Fuchs had amassed many from his work with Mott and Born and earned the degree. Around the same time, the Carnegie Trust awarded him a fellowship in mathematics to study (1) quantum theory, (2) statistical methods, and (3) theory of atomic nuclei. Born frequently described Fuchs by using some variant of the phrase “the best of his age group,” favorably comparing him to his Wunderkinder, all those future Nobel Prize winners he taught in Germany.
At the end of December 1937, the relative tranquility of academic life was shattered when Klaus learned that Gerhard was seriously ill in a sanatorium near Prague. It wasn’t only TB. He had had a mental collapse. Klaus continued to send Gerhard half of his twelve-pound monthly income from the university. Now he asked the British government for permission to travel to visit his brother, which it granted. Czechoslovakia, though, refused him a visa. He couldn’t turn to his father, who was barely surviving under the Nazis, so he wrote a letter to the Geheebs in Switzerland, close friends to Gerhard since the Odenwaldschule days:
Dear Frau Geheeb, I have received bad news about Gerhard and would like to turn to you with a request. Gerhard has had a complete nervous breakdown and at the moment is at an institution in Prague. . . . It seems urgent that he get out of Czechoslovakia into better air and a less stressful political atmosphere so that he really gets cured. I would be very grateful if you could procure the possibility for him to go to Switzerland. The greatest difficulty is surely the passport question.
I have written to Father very cautiously that Gerhard is down with his nerves. Because he cannot do anything from Germany, it is unnecessary to worry him with the stress.
There was more behind the letter. Nazi Germany had its eye on Czechoslovakia. As part of Hitler’s drive to annex foreign lands with a German culture, he demanded the Sudetenland, a section in the country that was majority German-speaking. Gerhard wasn’t in that region, but would the Nazis stop at some invisible line?
Unknown to Klaus, Elisabeth was in the thick of dangerous intrigues in Berlin. Her husband, Guschi, had been sentenced to seven years in prison, which he was serving on a ship that dredged the Elbe River. Through secret communication with Elisabeth, he had plotted an escape with another inmate. On the specified day, Elisabeth swam the Elbe to meet him, and he didn’t show up. Frantic, she returned to Berlin and told Emil she feared that the Gestapo had discovered the plan. She then ran off.
Emil heard a whistle outside—a signal—and looked out to see Guschi with old friend Arthur Rackwitz. Guschi told Emil that guards had arrested his escape partner. Guschi, who thrived in uncertain worlds, knew he couldn’t wait. He watched a man go into a hut on the bank and come out in workman’s overalls. Guschi sidled in, exchanged his prison uniform for the man’s civilian clothes, and casually walked out. Using money Elisabeth had passed to him earlier, he took a taxi to Berlin but knew he wouldn’t survive there as a marked man. He waited for Elisabeth until morning, but when she failed to return, he took off for Prague without her.
To all appearances, Klaus had heeded Born’s warning against communist activities. In reality, he had strengthened ties with German communist friends in London. An acquaintance from his days in Berlin, Jürgen Kuczynski, arrived in the English capital in July 1936, and he quickly became the political organizer of the secret German Communist Party in Britain. Driven and extremely capable, Kuczynski took the thirty to forty longtime KPD members there and formed a disciplined, effective, and tightly knit group to produce propaganda material for the German underground. Klaus was one of them. He acted as a conduit, arranging to send the material via coal ships from eastern Scotland.
Thirty-two-year-old Kuczynski had studied statistics at a German university, been a postgraduate fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and headed the economics department at the American Federation of Labor. With excellent English, he crisscrossed Britain to publicize a new socialist-oriented publishing enterprise, the Left Book Club, lecturing to economically deprived workers. It was a perfect cover for his clandestine activities. Klaus’s occasional trips to London and Kuczynski’s lecture tours gave the two men opportunities to stay in touch.
The Borns knew Klaus was a communist, and Kellermann suspected that his colleague had activist friends, although he had no direct evidence. The Born children and cousins braved Klaus’s long discourses on Marxism on their Sunday walks over the rolling Pentland Hills, as well as on outings to the movies to see his favorite, Bette Davis. On walks in the Pentland Hills with members of the physics music quartet, politics never arose. To most he seemed to be just one of many leftist graduate assistants, many of whom had been galvanized by the Spanish Civil War, where the main international aid for the Republicans came from communists.
Walter and Klaus rented rooms in town houses some three hundred feet apart on Marchmont Road, an area just south of the city’s large swath of parkland called the Meadows. Walter lived with his mother, who had escaped from Berlin, his father having died a few years before. Klaus lived in a miserable studio, one room in a dark and dank basement with a bed, two chairs, a desk, and no kitchen. One wall held a bookshelf with volumes from the Left Book Club but no propaganda leaflets, communist texts, or Marxist screeds. His landlady fed him breakfast; Walter’s mother washed his socks. The two physicists became good friends and often shared the twenty-minute walk to Born’s institute.
Afternoons often found them sitting in one or the other’s room talking politics. Walter listened to Klaus argue that the appeasement policy of Britain’s Chamberlain government concealed its real goal, which was “to turn German aggression towards Russia.” (Many Britons, especially those in the upper class, did consider Russia the enemy more than Germany.) Given the nonintervention of England and France in the Spanish Civil War, Klaus called Kellermann’s contention that they would stand up to Hitler “starry-eyed” and cited Chamberlain’s calmly sitting by as the Wehrmacht marched into Austria in March 1938.
And then, on September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had committed the cardinal sin of appeasement by handing Hitler the Sudetenland, confirming Klaus’s worst fears for Europe, and for his brother.
Gerhard was still in Prague, but by March 15, 1939, when the Nazis swallowed the whole country, he had escaped, thanks to Quakers who had wangled a British visa for him to enter Switzerland the month before. In July, he flew to England with plans to visit Klaus in Edinburgh and then travel to join Kristel in the United States. Customs authorities refused him permission to land, though, because of his active case of TB, and he returned to Switzerland.
Elisabeth’s needs were just as dire. She had never joined Guschi, who remained unaccounted for in Czechoslovakia. After he left Berlin, she had roamed Germany’s eastern border, then returned to the capital, where she spent her days painting and playing with her son. Sometimes, though, demons came, and episodes of madness descended. One night in the summer of 1939 while with Emil visiting friends in the country, she knelt beside her father’s bed, fraught with visions of Guschi tortured by the Gestapo. Friends from Berlin came to bring little Klaus back to the city.
Elisabeth calmed herself enough to travel with Emil to the Quaker Yearly Meeting in Bad Pyrmont. During the few days there, she seemed stable; she chatted and helped in the kitchen. The day before leaving, she gathered with others in front of an open window for a photograph. She smiled gaily, her eyes bright and clear.
On the morning of August 7, 1939, at the meeting’s end, she and Emil walked to the train station to depart for Berlin. Sensing that Elisabeth was unsettled, he held her hand as they climbed onto the train. As it started to roll, he dropped her hand to steady himself, and she dashed from his side. When he looked around, the train door was open. She had jumped. He found her at the bottom of a ravine with her head smashed.
A few months later, Emil wrote to friends that the weeks since “had exceeded any misery or hardship I’ve ever been through. To this day, I do not know how to carry on without her.” But as with all the tragedies in his life—and he had more than most people could bear—he relied on God. “However, it has worked so far and has to work out further. God has helped and will help, and the love of many friends has carried me. . . . She was on the peak of her talent and her last paintings are the most beautiful. But that was probably the seeking of life further after this life.” Years later, Klaus saved this letter of his father’s out of hundreds.
Within a week, Klaus began to receive condolences. He said little. On official forms, as he had done in relation to his mother’s suicide, he entered Elisabeth’s cause of death as “political reasons.”
On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. This onslaught, the first example of the German tactic of Blitzkrieg, quickly overwhelmed the country’s defenses.
Two days later, on Sunday morning, the Borns invited Fuchs and a few others over for cakes and tea. They were in the sitting room when the air raid siren sounded. Everyone jumped up to stand in doorways or scoot under tables. It was a false alarm—friendly aircraft mistaken for the enemy. It was also one of the last times they would gather for cakes, soon to be a scarce pleasure. That day, over the wireless, Neville Chamberlain pronounced, “This country is at war with Germany.”
Britain’s declaration of war left Fuchs unconvinced. A war against fascism? he asked Walter Kellermann rhetorically. “No,” he answered, rather a war along old-fashioned nationalist lines. The British would fight for the survival of Britain, but not to defeat Hitler and defend democracy. He explained that his barometer was the British press. Except for Churchill’s speeches warning of Hitler’s aggression, he read little that showed awareness of Germany’s true intent. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Evening News, and others had supported Chamberlain’s appeasement in the face of Hitler’s aggressions.
A twist on this argument explained Klaus’s rationalization of the stunning nonaggression pact between Germany and Russia signed a month before. In this pact, the two countries agreed not to attack each other or support another country that was their enemy. Klaus argued that Chamberlain’s goal all along had been to provoke a fight between Germany and Russia (with Russia the presumed loser). With many in the British government more sympathetic to the Nazis than to the communists, Stalin’s sudden shift was merely pragmatic. Russia needed time to build its defenses.
There was substance to Klaus’s arguments. Russia had been in disarray from the time of World War I and the civil war that followed the revolution, as well as the years of famine and forced collectivization. Still, it was a jolt to idealistic Westerners who saw the Communist Party as leading the way to a new era in human development. For years, the party, and especially Germans like Klaus, had worked night and day to destroy the Nazis and fascism, not to join hands with them.
Officially, the Communist Party pivoted its propaganda to decry an imperialist war. At the same time, tripping over contradictions, the British Communist Party issued manifestos and declarations that supported Britain’s new war footing. The government watched carefully for any call to resist it. There was none.
In July 1939, Klaus had applied to become a naturalized British citizen, but he was too late. Once the war started, the government stopped processing applications. In a quick reversal, his category switched from refugee to “enemy alien.” Along with seventy-three thousand others—mostly German Jews—he was ordered to stand in court before a judge to determine if he was a danger to the country.
Facing uncertainty and fear, the government convened 120 tribunals throughout the country to classify refugees. A was for those most likely to undermine the country, and they were immediately interned; B was for those whose allegiances were uncertain, and they had their movements restricted; and C was for those who were religious or political refugees, and they had few restrictions imposed.
On November 2, 1939, on orders of the secretary of state for Scotland, Klaus walked with Max Born to the Edinburgh Sheriff Court in the center of the city. To this home of justice, its neo-Georgian facade embodying the values of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was to bring a statement from a British subject to attest to his character and the oppression in Germany. He had letters from Paul Sturge, general secretary of the Friends Service Council in London, and Born, whose own naturalization papers had come through just days before the war started.
The courtroom held friendly faces. Walter Kellermann, accompanied by his mother, was there for his hearing. Besides police officers and officials from the British Home Office, representatives from Edinburgh’s Refugee Committee and Jewish Committee stood ready to assist if needed. The head of the Jewish Committee, Kellermann’s reference, graciously supported Fuchs as well.
It was over in a matter of minutes. Those in attendance vouched for Klaus, a persecuted Social Democrat; the clerk took notes in shorthand; and the one-man tribunal, Chairman Simpson, ordered that as a “Refugee from Nazi oppression” Fuchs be granted “Exemption from Internment.” Klaus became a category C refugee with minimal restrictions on travel and movement; Kellermann earned the same.
They walked back to Born’s department to continue their research and teaching. Fuchs had a new grant in mathematics from the Carnegie Trust. With that funding, he worked on quantum dynamics and statistical mechanics with Born. Probably on his own, he explored the theory of atomic nuclei.
Some of Klaus’s friends were less fortunate. A tribunal classified Jürgen Kuczynski, the energy behind London’s small group of German communists, in category A as a serious security risk. He was interned, but his connections ensured that it wasn’t for long. Members of Parliament, the dean of Canterbury (first cousin to the queen), and all manner of British elite pressured the Home Office to release him. Within a few months, he was free.
A steady state of anxiety prevailed as the world watched Hitler overrun all countries in his path. In the early hours of May 10, 1940, from the ground, in gliders, with parachutes, German troops attacked Belgium and the Netherlands. Bombs shattered the rest. That evening, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister.
The Borns had invited Kellermann and Fuchs over to play bridge. By the time of the party, the Belgians were only twenty-four hours away from surrender. The Dutch fell quickly thereafter.
At its closest point, Britain is about twenty miles from the French coast. Within a matter of hours, Prime Minister Churchill ordered Sir John Anderson, the home secretary, to intern every male enemy alien between sixteen and sixty from the vulnerable eastern coast “in view of the imminent risk of invasion.”
Anderson, a thoughtful and serious public servant, didn’t support internment. His report “Control of Aliens,” prepared two weeks earlier, argued for individual examination. He maintained that the government’s prior steps were adequate: registration for entry by immigrants; examination of the 73,353 aliens by tribunals; declaration of the eastern coast as a protected area that restricted aliens. Germans who were known or suspected Nazis had been encouraged to return home. Those who didn’t were interned. Anderson had concluded, “Obviously, no decision that a purely arbitrary proportion of Germans and Austrians should be interned could be justified. Nor would the internment of an arbitrary proportion without regard to the characters and circumstances of the individuals have any value for security purposes.”
Addressing a large-scale internment similar to that in the previous war, Anderson asserted, would waste manpower, not guarantee the safety of vulnerable points, and rile public opinion. But therein was the problem. He knew that headlines such as “Collar the Lot” whipped up substantial public sentiment and “easily excited” negative feelings against refugees.
Anderson lost the argument; the military prevailed. On May 11, he had to issue orders to the chief constables to intern the “enemy aliens” along the eastern coast. “All male Germans and Austrians, including refugees, ‘rounded up’ and interned,” Hedi Born wrote with alarm in her diary. The order affirmed Max Born’s belief in the ferocity of ideologies. He wrote to Hedi, “Fanaticism versus fanaticism, belief versus belief, the distortion and repression of truth is raised to a political art.”
On Whitsunday, the twelfth, morning until night, constables rapped on doors up and down the coast from Nairn to Hampshire. Friendly, even apologetic, police told three thousand refugees to pack a suitcase with enough to last for two weeks and come along. Because of its location, those in Edinburgh, including Fuchs and Kellermann, were among the first to be affected by the day-old edict.
It became evident very quickly that a fifth column, foreign collaborators inside a country under attack, had conspired in the annihilation of the Netherlands, so the pressure on Home Secretary Anderson didn’t stop. Churchill and others in the War Cabinet wanted to know the possibility of a German fifth column in Britain. Anderson met with the Dutch and learned that the Nazis had been able to set up agents there thanks to the Dutch having an open border with Germany, a right of free access guaranteed by treaty. The fifth column required no subterfuge. According to the Dutch, there was “no evidence that such assistance had been given by the refugee element.”
The situation in Britain simply wasn’t analogous to that in the Netherlands. Anderson, convinced by the “very strong and obvious objections to wholesale measures of internment,” recommended that the government not implement a general one.
The War Cabinet met at 10 Downing Street the next day and took up the question. There was only one vote in the room that counted: Churchill insisted on stiffer measures. By the end of the summer, the government had put about twenty-seven thousand men and women into camps. Interestingly, Jürgen Kuczynski, Fuchs’s London friend, wasn’t among them. His earlier release was permanent.
In the eyes of officials in Whitehall, Fuchs, Kellermann, and thousands of other internees were no longer refugees from Nazi oppression but likely Nazi saboteurs. The government, in its muddled thinking about the dangers of a fifth column, had gathered up those most likely to be threatened by Nazis: Jewish refugees. Many in the War Cabinet and the security services felt that if there were an invasion, “a considerable number of enemy aliens, who might now be genuinely well-disposed to this country, would, by virtue of their nationality, help the enemy. On this view, even enemy aliens who were refugees from the Nazi regime presented a potential danger.”
On the night of May 12, Fuchs and Kellermann found each other at Donaldson’s School, where the local police had deposited them along with scores of others. Empty because of a holiday, the school had transformed itself overnight into a miserable military transit camp. According to Born, Klaus went to the authorities, demanded urgent supplies for the internees, and helped to locate them. A few days later, after the military worked out a makeshift arrangement for their next camp, the police crammed the detainees onto a train and took them away. They had no idea where they were going.