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 RYsselsheim, 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 gate, urged him, "Pastor, hurry up. They'll beat up your boy." Emil wanted Klaus, his second son and a "sensitive soul," to follow in the family tradition and become a Lutheran minister. Klaus had other ambitions. Having inherited his father's strong will, as well as a gift for mathematics, he won. Since 1921, Klaus had attended Eisenach's Gymnasium, a 750-year-old school originally church sponsored with instruction in Latin that had educated Luther and Bach. By the time of Klaus's graduation, as a family friend later remembered, he was "known and famous" for his mathematics brilliance. His classmates vied for his help, especially in math. Even so, Klaus later said that he never had any friends there. In 1927, Adolf Hitler, the hero of the right-wing veterans' groups and leader of the rapidly rising National Socialist Workers Party, spoke at Eisenach's Hotel FYrstenhof to a full house. The following year, the tenth anniversary of Germany's new, supposedly democratic order, the government announced an award of a special history book to the top student in each city. After the celebration at school, Klaus came home and told his father that he had won the prize for Eisenach. Pleased, Emil replied, "You can be proud of that!" "No," Klaus said, "I'm not. When the school celebration ended, the headmaster came past my bench and said, 'Klaus, come with me to my room for a moment.' There he gave me the book in private!" Emil saw his son's hurt. He guessed that the headmaster considered Emil's politics too well-known and provocative for a presentation to Klaus before the Gymnasium's conservative students. Unlike his father and siblings, Klaus didn't engage in political discussions. Only once did he let politics provoke him. In 1929, at his school's celebration of the republic's constitution, students mocked the anniversary, hanging the republic's flag upside down and wearing the imperial badge. Goaded, Klaus pinned the badge of the republic to his lapel. A student ripped it off. This was Klaus's last year at the Gymnasium. When he graduated, he came home and threw his books in a corner, angrily telling his father, "None of these masters ever gets to see me again!" There was one exception: Dr. Erich Koch, a young, exciting teacher of physics and mathematics. Throughout his life Koch remained friends with the "quiet and pale" young man from the Gymnasium in Eisenach. Klaus would later describe his childhood as "very happy." Certainly, at times it was. His kindly mother, Else, raised the children while Emil traveled to lecture on education and religion. "It was the power of my wife," Emil wrote, "who, though suffering from many attacks of melancholy, perhaps for that very reason spread a circle of quiet joy which one could not resist." When he was around, the rectory vibrated with evening discussion groups, formal instruction, and parties. A friend of Klaus's remembered dancing to folk music and singing socialist songs. Emil described a "big, lively house." His tempo ensured it. Emil also had a tough side. Even he thought his political persona, with "hints and reminders and reprimands," was sometimes too severe. He never connected this insight to the family. A good friend of Klaus's later related that Klaus described his father as "a martinet," as illustrated by his demand for coffee and cake at exactly 4:00 p.m. each day. As an older man, Klaus wistfully said to his nephew, whom Emil had raised, "I'm jealous of you. You had his kind side." He didn't stop with that, adding, "There are some things I can't forgive him for." He didn't elaborate on the complex relationship. It is unlikely that eighteen-year-old Klaus recognized May 12, 1930, for an especially consequential day when he took the train to Leipzig, filled out the registration card for enrollment at the university, and declared studies in mathematics and physics. His brother, Gerhard, who had been a law student at the university for the last two years, changed apartments so that the quiet, scholarly, and politically remote Klaus could live with him at Stieglitzstrasse 24. His sister Elisabeth lived close by while she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. But the larger world, as well as KlausÕs private one along with it, was shifting on its axis. Leipzig was situated directly east of the center of Germany. It had grown from an important market town in the Middle Ages, with a confluence of three rivers and two important trading routes, into a large industrial one. Traditionally, the city enjoyed a strong economy and important cultural position. Along the way, it had attracted luminaries in the world of music. Eisenach's own J. S. Bach had composed some of his most important works during his quarter century in residence. Mozart, Liszt, and Mendelssohn also spent time there. But Leipzig, like all of Germany, was now in the midst of change. Emil had shaped his children with the ideals of the Social Democratic Party. The SPD, which had a plurality in GermanyÕs parliamentary body, the Reichstag, had risen as a political force in the late nineteenth century, when two workersÕ rights parties merged to advance equality and support trade unions in a capitalist system. Within it, though, a militant faction influenced by the teachings of Marx and Engels stirred tensions. At the war's end in 1918, fraught relationships forced a wrenching split in the fragile coalition. The moderates, Emil Fuchs's branch, believed in a democratic process with a platform of social equality. The radicals argued that capitalists would never willingly cede power and called for revolution. In the rupture, the moderates maintained the SPD name; the radicals ultimately became the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD. Immediately after the war, the radicals fought in the streets to establish worker councils mirroring those Russia had formed in its revolution a year before. The Social Democrats, who controlled the new government after the kaiser abdicated, crushed the revolt. Unforgivably, their militia tortured and murdered the revolt's two leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. From then on, the communists hated the Social Democrats, even when facing threats far greater than their differences. In 1930, the year Klaus entered the university, the Nazis earned 18 percent of the vote in the elections for the Reichstag, a huge increase over the previous election, but still the combined percentages for the SPD and the KPD were almost 38 percent. Together the SPD and the KPD had power, but animosity and zealotry prevented them from using it. By this time, the Great Depression that had begun with the Wall Street crash of October 1929 had crossed the ocean and sent Germany's economy reeling all over again. The new hardship was another incitement for the generation of unemployed young men who had gone from fighting in the streets to saluting "Heil Hitler." But the belligerent and nationalistic ideas of the Nazis were not confined to the slums and the working-class districts. These same sentiments had infected many young people with the means to attend universities. Like their jackbooted colleagues in the streets, the right-wing students used violence to intimidate Jews and foreigners, especially to keep them from participating in the democratic process. They boycotted professors whose lectures didn't promote Nazi ideals, pressuring the rector to remove them. Some of the faculty-party members who actively pushed Nazi propaganda-abetted the students. Others simply went along. As one professor in Leipzig later said, "It was totally futile to be against the National Socialists at the university, as a significant part of the faculty tended to the ideas of the right-wing party or had no desire to burn their fingers with the visibly rising new power." Excerpted from Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
