The St. Lawrence narrowed, and the scent of pine and spruce wafted across the ship’s bow. Klaus Fuchs, along with the other thirteen hundred emaciated enemy aliens packed together on the ship’s deck, looked out on the verdant riverbank. After ten days of living hell crossing the Atlantic, this seemed like a vision of heaven. One internee estimated that given the bagginess of his clothes and the protrusion of his ribs, he had probably lost ten pounds on the trip. Now church bells pealed in the distance, and the earth smelled sweet.
On this sunny Saturday, July 13, 1940, roll call began on the upper deck at ten o’clock, and the sun’s heat was welcome. As they came into a harbor at last, tugboats guided them past the bustling shoreline. At 1:30 p.m., the ship reached its dock. Looming high above, majestic and bold, was the Château Frontenac. They had reached their destination—Quebec. The rumor had been true.
By 4:00 p.m., the men had stood for six hours in the sunshine that had gone from welcome to searing. After a long while, soldiers gave them their first drink of water—lukewarm but delicious. Bathroom facilities became accessible too, but internees doubled up with hunger pains received no solace. Some simply lay down on the deck until the colonel ordered the sentries to use bayonets, if necessary, to get them up. The officer viciously kicked a few to make his point.
The Nazi POWs occupied another part of the deck and disembarked first. It was 7:30 before the refugees began to wind down the gangplank onto a pier lined with well-armed soldiers. The men walked past them and climbed onto buses where three guards made sure that these “dangerous men”—so beaten down that they could barely climb into their seats—caused no trouble. As motorcycle police escorted the buses up through the neighborhoods terraced into the city heights, little boys derisively gave the Nazi salute, women stood on corners shaking their fists at them, some spat and yelled—much the same scene as when they had left Huyton.
The buses reached the heights of the city and drove through the gates of the massive citadel onto the Plains of Abraham, where in 1759 British forces defeated the French for control of Canada. At the top, in an area known as Cove Fields, a camp nested within double rows of barbed wire and sentry posts with machine guns stretched out before them. Beyond that, in the distance, the unattainable and wild freedom of the St. Lawrence River.
When war broke out in 1939, the Canadian military had hastily constructed the camp as a temporary site for troops waiting to ship out to the European front. Newly outfitted as a prison compound, it would now hold 793 category B and C internees, about 60 percent of them Jewish, intermingled with about 90 pro-Nazi internees. Cove Fields had become Camp L.
After leaving the buses and being hustled into one of the dull-gray wooden huts, the men heard the sergeant major bark the first order: strip naked for inspection for venereal disease. Soldiers took their clothes—the stained and filthy ones they hadn’t changed in the ten days on board—and emptied out their pockets to facilitate a search for sharp objects. Naked, starving, and vulnerable, surrounded by soldiers who spoke only French, the internees stood helpless as the soldiers returned some of the belongings to the internees’ bags and put the more valuable ones in their own pockets. Precious watches, fountain pens, lighters, cigarettes, small amounts of British pounds—everything the internees had in this new world—vanished.
The inspectors found two hundred cases of dysentery and a few of typhus. Klaus’s inspection report noted his “three false teeth in front” but no other health problems. He was, however, extremely thin. At five feet ten, he weighed 126 pounds.
At one o’clock that morning, the lucky ones, those who had left the ship in the first group, were fed. It had been seventeen hours since their last meal, the hours meticulously counted by the starving men. The unlucky ones waited another two hours to get their slice of bread and slab of gelatinous meat called bully beef. The one glass of water was a lifesaver, a memory to be relished years later.
In each hut that first night, one hundred men slept in bunk beds crowded into a room designed to accommodate fewer than eighty. Barbed wire covered every window. As on the Ettrick, the door was locked, and there was no bathroom in the hut. In an emergency, the distressed refugee switched the lights on and off for a guard to escort him to the latrine.
The next day a couple hundred POWs in Nazi uniforms strutted into the camp. Pondering whether the Canadians realized the impact on them, one Jewish refugee thought, “Surely not—they think we’re one and the same—all GERMANS.” Early in the morning a few days later, the POWs marched out of the camp, singing as they left.
Nazis in the camp—internees and POWs alike—agitated the refugees, but no fights broke out. The men did hear that a guard shot a young man in the leg who had been trying to climb out of a barbed-wire-covered window. Rumors spread: he was relieving himself through the window; he was trying to escape; he had gone crazy. He was taken to a hospital in Quebec and expected to recover. Inexplicably, he died the next day. A report attributed the death to “shock” rather than the gunshot wound. The fact is, the boy had suffered beatings in a German concentration camp and went berserk on seeing the barbed wire and the watchtowers. When a guard put him in an isolation cell, he tried to escape.
As on the Isle of Man, the huts elected “fathers.” Fuchs and Kellermann were selected from their respective huts, Fuchs entrenched in the communist group and Kellermann with his new friends. The leaders of the Ettrick’s lavatory cleanup brigades, Hans Kahle and Count von Lingen, were also elected. The camp commander, Major C. W. Wiggs, appointed Lingen camp leader—the internee who was to bring the commander complaints, then take instructions back to the other hut fathers.
Kahle and Klaus fumed at Wiggs that the son of the former German crown prince should represent refugees. Wiggs made no change. The majority of refugees admired both Lingen and Kahle for their singular abilities and protective air of authority. Klaus saw the prince as nothing more than a capitalistic predator.
Tall, blond, blue-eyed, polite, and immaculately groomed, even on the Ettrick, the twenty-eight-year-old Count von Lingen was the great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria—and every inch a Hohenzollern. Fearing negative publicity, the British government had refused to give him special treatment and, instead, swept him up along with the other thirty German students at Cambridge. The queen’s granddaughter Princess Alice was wife of the governor-general, the king’s representative in Canada, and lived in Ottawa. Lingen called her “Aunt Alice.” After learning Lingen’s identity, the Canadian authorities treated him carefully.
The exiled prince used the familial connection to benefit his fellow internees where he could. The few times he was allowed to attend a party at Aunt Alice’s residence, he looted the ashtrays for cigarette butts—gold in the camp—for the experts there to tear them apart to get at the tobacco and re-roll. After he requested recreational equipment, her aide arrived with boxes full.
The polar opposite of the kaiser’s grandson in the political scheme of things, forty-one-year-old Hans Kahle was a military man and the son of one. He had fought in World War I as a teenager and then the Spanish Civil War, where he commanded the Austro-German battalion in the XI International and became friends with Ernest Hemingway. The rumor in Camp L was that Hemingway had modeled General Hans, a minor but praised character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, on Kahle. True or not, the celebrity gave Kahle added panache as well as the rank of general among the internees, even though he was only a colonel.
Internees uniformly found Klaus quiet, introverted, and intellectual, not one to show off his abilities. He attracted a group of “young chaps” around him, but he wasn’t universally liked. One friend thought his shyness sometimes caused him to be abrupt. Others found his “fanatical” expression of Marxist views aggravating. The camp’s intelligence officer considered him Kahle’s deputy. For Klaus, it appeared that Kahle had replaced Gerhard in the role of older brother, showing the way.
At the first council meeting, the hut fathers confronted the unsettling question of why the Canadians treated them as dangerous. They composed a letter stating that they were loyal to the Crown, not fifth columnists, and delivered it to Major Wiggs, who believed them. He had already formed his own opinion, remarking sardonically, “I never knew so many Jews were Nazis.”
The Canadian government’s official answer explained the “why” in simple terms: They had agreed to take three thousand German POWs and four thousand German internees described as “so dangerous, in attitude and design, that their presence in England at a time of threatened invasion was a menace to the safety of the nation.” The refugees were stunned to discover that they were not only considered part of the four thousand but also, inexplicably, branded as POWs.
The council deluged officials in Ottawa and in England—the War Office, the Home Office, members of Parliament—protesting the repulsive Nazi POW label. There was no reply.
Within the camp, Lingen as internee leader used “old-fashioned diplomacy” and a deferential attitude to deal with the issue. Meanwhile, the communists and young Jews who had suffered under Gestapo sadism demanded a more confrontational approach.
Kahle and Klaus assembled a “refugee” committee around the issue of the POW label. They were part of the leadership—Klaus, the secretary—the core of which was Jewish. Klaus now had authority to act. Later, in describing the committee, he used a telling “we”:
In contrast to the camp administration under a Hohenzollern prince, which was set up by the Canadian authorities, we organized the overwhelming majority of the camp in a refugee committee.
Rather than just preach to friends about communism, Klaus Fuchs had once again become an active resister.
It was a deft move that gained Kahle’s communist group a larger base of support. While everyone resented the POW status, with its locked hut doors, machine guns, and POW uniforms, the Jews had an overriding fear that they might become tokens in a prisoner exchange. One young Jewish refugee wrote, “So, the English are in the position now to turn us over to Hitler in return for English prisoners of war. This is the prospect for us refugees from Nazi Oppression!” Their label could determine whether they survived.
Mail was the first battle in the war over the POW designation. Canadian authorities prominently placed the words “Prisoners of War Mail” in large, heavy type on envelopes for the refugees’ use. Postcards read the same. Incensed by the mischaracterization, the refugees threatened to smash up the camp. After weeks and weeks, they needed to contact their families. They agonized over the decision to use the stationery. Ultimately, they united against it.
The hut-father council, working to find a solution, proposed crossing out “POW Mail” and inserting “Civilian Internee Mail.” Major Wiggs approved the change, and after modifying the stationery by hand, the refugees wrote home that they were safe.
Days later, sacks of letters appeared. The censors in Ottawa had rejected all mail with the cross outs. Some refugees gave in and wrote to their families on the POW paper. Others protested by sending the POW postcard with only their name and status in Canada. The Kahle-Fuchs faction had a mail strike for a couple of weeks but finally wrote one letter to their families about the POW classification and vowed not to write again until it changed.
When the internees at long last received letters from England—twenty-five hundred arrived at once—the news was mixed. The Blitzkrieg and the U-boats’ relentless attacks on the navy threatened their families and England. However, headlines from the sinking of the Arandora Star had created pressure to release the civilian internees. Ones such as “Friendly Aliens, Grave Injustice” championed the men’s cause. A few outraged members of Parliament examined government officials on deportation decisions during Question Time in the House of Commons. The government either dissembled or had no answers. Home Secretary John Anderson, who had argued against internment, was the exception. He spoke forthrightly:
I am not here to deny that most regrettable and deplorable things have happened in connection with the internment camps. I regret them deeply. They have been due partly to the inevitable haste with which the policy of internment had to be carried out. They were due, however, in some cases to mistakes of individuals, stupidity, muddling. These things all relate to the past. So far as we can remedy mistakes, we shall remedy them.
Parliamentary pressure caused the government to issue a white paper at the beginning of August 1940 that detailed eighteen classes of category C internees who were eligible for release. Included in the list was a class for scientists who could aid in the war effort.
Watching the shifting policy from Edinburgh, Max Born, a prodigious and persistent letter writer, waged his own campaigns. He had already pushed prestigious academic friends in the United States, including Albert Einstein and the mathematician John von Neumann, to send reading material to Fuchs and Kellermann in Canada. In a letter to von Neumann, he wrote of Fuchs as “really a rare personality and it would be a shame to let him go down after he has suffered by Nazi persecution more than any of us.” His friends did comply, and Born’s former students eventually received physics books and journals, but with the initial ban on mail and difficulty with delivery it took weeks.
Then Born pressured the Royal Society, Britain’s august national academy of science, to recommend Fuchs and Kellermann for release to the Home Office. It included them on its list for the government to consider.
With time, physical conditions in the camp improved. The bountiful Canadian fields and farms provided three hearty meals a day. The internees had won the heart and hand of the corpulent Major Wiggs, whom they nicknamed Piggy-Wiggy after Dickens’s Pickwick.
But boredom was still a problem. The internees’ only assigned task was to clear space for exercise in the rocky field surrounding the huts. Otherwise, their day began at the 6:30 a.m. reveille and continued with the prescribed activities—meals, inspections, and so on—until 11:00 p.m. Initially, guards removed all reading material; newspapers and magazines were banned. This in a population crowded with intellectual firepower. As Major Wiggs exclaimed, “Some of the brainiest people in Canada are in this camp.”
From within the barbed wire, the world would gain a future Nobelist in biochemistry (Max Perutz), developers of the steady state theory of the universe, engineers, industrialists, journalists, painters, architects, and professors. Many a name later bore a “Sir” before it. By September, they had resolved the boredom by founding a university and cultural center, a grander version of the institutions they had founded on the Isle of Man. The list of classes ran from bookbinding and bricklaying, to preparing for British matriculation exams, to high-level university subjects. Fuchs, whose pupil Perutz remembered his “remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts lucidly,” taught theoretical physics and mathematics.
The sympathetic major Wiggs brought in a piano, and musicians, many professional, gave inspiring concerts in the mess hall or outside. Staging and lighting gradually appeared. The Quebecois listened to the performances from Battlefields Park, a broad swath of grass and rolling hills that commemorates the surrender of the French Marquis de Montcalm to the British General James Wolfe in 1759.
Through the layers of barbed wire, internees could watch tennis players, picnickers, and strollers enjoy the freedom denied to them. Knowing that these outsiders could see in as well, they used the opportunity to advertise who they were. A sign in English and in French, crafted from rugs and sackcloth and hung on the wall of a hut, read, “We are refugees from Nazi Oppression.”
News of the white paper and the decision to release some category C refugees reached Canada by the end of August, but the debunking of past “news” made the men afraid to think of freedom. And something closer to home occupied them.
As icy winds and rain already howled across the St. Lawrence River, fierce enough to keep them huddled in their uninsulated huts, a new rumor circulated: they were to be moved to another camp. Huts at Camp L couldn’t protect them from the impending frigid winter air. And in fact, thirty pro-Nazi Germans left for a different camp the next day.
Within two weeks, the director of internment operations requested the hut fathers draw up a list of the internees, noting professions and trades, religion, and original tribunal category of each man. A week later he wanted a count of Jews and Gentiles. This raised the inevitable and polarizing question: What are the definitions of “Gentile” and “Jew”? “The term ‘Jew,’” the hut fathers were told, “means a person of Jewish faith or race.”
The hut fathers called a special meeting to give a count: “498 Jews, 121 persons of Jewish descent, and 141 persons of non-Jewish descent (Aryan).” That same day the guards hung prison numbers on the internees, took their photographs, then fingerprinted one finger. One internee described it as “very Dachau-like.” The parsing of “Gentile,” “Aryan,” and “Jew” provoked other parallels—the fatal racial divisions in Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws.
On September 27, the internees learned that they would be split up on racial grounds and sent to new camps: the 141 Gentiles to an “Aryan camp,” the rest to a “Jewish camp.” Complaints from Orthodox Jews about working on the Sabbath or having pork sausage as a staple on the menu had persuaded the authorities to create a kosher camp.
To soften reactions, the authorities described the new Jewish camp as a model with every amenity.
Lingen, Kahle, Fuchs, and others drafted a protest to Major Wiggs:
[We] should like to protest with all emphasis against a separation based on racial grounds. It is true that the majority among the refugees are Jews. But by no means all. Many of the others are persons who, though no longer of Jewish faith, are Jewish or partially Jewish by descent and had to leave Germany because of racial persecution. What is still more important, many others are refugees from Nazi Germany on political grounds.
The internees thought of separation in terms of Nazi versus anti-Nazi, not race or religion. New friendships among the Jews (confessing and non-confessing), Protestants, and Catholics had eliminated religious boundaries. A primary worry was the makeup of the alternative Aryan camp. Would it be a “Nazi camp,” one filled with pro-Nazi Germans?
Major Wiggs wrote a letter to the director of internment operations supporting the refugees’ position. The director would not alter the decision.
Canadian officials knew the total number of Gentiles—141—but not the names. When surveyed, only 80 identified themselves. Major Wiggs wanted the missing 61 names, who happened to be the political refugees. As one refugee noted, it boiled down to “where Kahle and his group were sent.”
Schemes floated up to fill the “Aryan” quota. Jews who wanted to stay with close Gentile friends considered losing a Jewish parent and becoming “1/2 Jews”; Gentiles who wanted to go to the Jewish camp suddenly discovered Jewish grandmothers in the family tree.
Jews who considered racial separation anathema didn’t care who the sixty-one were. They wanted to thwart the government’s intent. Kahle used the refugee committee to do so. Unusually direct for him, Klaus later declared, “I was especially responsible for the review of the refugees in the camp.” He craftily kept Kahle’s group out of the “Aryan camp.”
Major Wiggs sent off the final list of names for the two camps on October 8 and informed Lingen that he was one of a hundred going to the Aryan camp.
On the morning of October 15, the “kosher” group said sad goodbyes to the others and walked to the train station in the pouring rain, wearing the hated POW uniforms: blue trousers with a red stripe down the sides and a blue jacket with a large red circle on the back they likened to a bull’s-eye target. On either side soldiers with bayonets guarded them. At 8:30 a.m., the train departed with 618 men eagerly awaiting the model camp promised them.
The train traveled for a few hours through dense forests and by rippling lakes and reached the end of the line at 1:30 p.m. The men looked out the windows and saw two huge, seemingly abandoned brick buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Disembarking, they traipsed through the mud and rain into the larger of the two. They found dust and soot covering six stinky indoor latrines, five cold-water taps, and six lights with bare bulbs. The empty buildings were part of a railroad depot near Sherbrooke and Newington, small towns south of Quebec. To the men, Camp N, as it was called, was “worse than imagination could have invented:”
Train tracks criss-cross the stone floor, which is covered with a layer of foul-smelling mud. There are several large pits in the floor, half filled with stagnant water. . . . Everywhere puddles of rainwater have collected. It has either blown in through the broken windowpanes or leaked through the roof.
As the refugees would find, the “worse” was yet to come. When they objected to the putrid dump and their treatment, the commandant threatened to shut the doors, turn off the lights, turn off the heat, and cut off rations; if that didn’t work, he would request that Ottawa transfer them to a Nazi camp. The sergeant major, a bull of a man with “malicious eyes and a hateful glean,” yelled at those he called “dirty Jews.” Sadistic guards shoved anyone who didn’t obey into an isolation cell, cold, dark, and cramped, six feet by four feet, with a sack of straw, no light except a window, and a pail for waste. An internee equated them to Nazis, “brutal men without heart and some who delight in malice and bad treatment.”
Camp life continued nonetheless, with hut fathers, who included Fuchs and Kellermann, and with Kahle named as camp leader. Regular mail, magazines, and newspapers arrived. The men organized to make the camp habitable. They slept, ate, cleaned, and built the facilities they needed.
The word “release” was in the air, Canadian and British newspapers having quoted politicians who dared to utter it. By November 1940, the Germans were no longer on Britain’s doorstep. The government had withstood the Blitzkrieg. It could now address the “vocal element”—the internees and their supporters in the Commons. “The rough and ready measures adapted in the early summer,” it said, “had been justified by the danger during that period, but we can afford to take a less stringent line.” The government’s emissary for a “less stringent line” was Alexander Paterson, His Majesty’s commissioner of prisons in Britain and a true social reformer, the perfect ambassador.
Paterson arrived at Camp N in mid-November’s frigid weather wearing a tweed suit, a hat, and no overcoat. The refugees judged him “our savior, our messiah.” For three days he sat in a makeshift office high up in a loft interviewing 350 internees in category C, Fuchs and Kellermann among them. Days later, a mere 11 names appeared on a list for release for home. Kahle and 10 others left the camp, no other information given. In a few more days, a camp official posted another list with 156 more to leave in mid-December. This one included Fuchs and Kellermann.
The night of December 15 was a time for parties and farewells for the chosen 156. The next morning, they began a twenty-eight-hour train ride to Halifax. Just before Christmas, they boarded the Thysville, along with Kahle and his group of 10, and feasted on hors d’oeuvres, soup, fish, chicken, and special Christmas pudding. One of the internees thought it the best dinner he had ever eaten. They sailed the next day in a convoy.
With the Battle of the Atlantic in full force, they crisscrossed toward Iceland to avoid U-boats. Unlike during the trip over, they “traveled like grown-ups,” staying in cabins, sleeping on clean sheets, eating good food, and all without guards. But they slept in their clothes and wore life belts. The sea was choppy, breakers washed over the bow, and U-boats were still an invisible threat.
Seventeen days later, on January 11, 1941, they cut through a minefield near the Irish coast and reached the Liverpool harbor around 9:00 p.m. Air raid sirens screamed, delaying their disembarkation. With its access to the Atlantic and its war construction, Liverpool was under constant threat from German bombers. Just two weeks earlier, 350 people had died in a Luftwaffe raid.
After the all clear, the returning detainees descended the gangplank, where soldiers again waited with bayonets. Dismayed, the captain explained to the commander of the detachment that these were not dangerous men. The troops removed the bayonets.
Immigration officers processed Fuchs and Kellermann at Huyton Camp and gave them ration books and train tickets to Edinburgh. The government had granted them permission to reside in the protected coastal area. By the thirteenth, they were home. It had been a very long eight months, and a critical period in Klaus’s life, especially the close camaraderie with Kahle. How much of a difference Kahle made in his allegiance to communism is not known. But it certainly would have reinforced a commitment to the cause.