Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [27]
Max Born met Klaus Fuchs at Edinburgh in 1937. Fuchs was, Born remembered, ‘a very nice, quiet fellow with sad eyes’. Dorothy McKibben, whose job it was to greet and help settle the scientists who came to Los Alamos in 1943 and after, thought Fuchs ‘one of the kindest and best-natured men I ever met’. Assigned to the British delegation at Los Alamos, Fuchs was cooperative, hardworking, and serious. He spoke infrequently— ‘penny-in-the-slot Fuchs’, Genia Peierls called him—and willingly babysat other people’s children, having none of his own. He was pale and roundshouldered, nearsighted, and a chain smoker.12
Fuchs was not Jewish, but he was nevertheless one of Hitler’s victims and his gifts. His father was a Lutheran pastor who later cast his lot with Quakerism, a pacifist in a society with limited tolerance for peacemongering. Klaus’s mother and sister both committed suicide. At the University of Leipzig, where he studied math and physics, Klaus became a political activist, first as a member of the Socialist Party, then as a Communist sympathizer who openly opposed Fascism and organized left-wing militants to do battle with the Fascist Brown Shirts who descended like plagues on German campuses. He was at the University of Kiel when Hitler took control of the country. One February day in 1933, a group of Brown Shirts arrived to harass professors and intimidate left-wing students. One of them spotted Fuchs, who was known to have informed on the Nazis previously. The Brown Shirts beat Fuchs badly and threw him into the Kiel Canal.13
If Fuchs had had doubts about formally associating himself with the German Communist Party, they now dissipated. A few days after he had been beaten in Kiel, he took a train to Berlin and declared himself to the Party leadership there. ‘I was ready to accept the philosophy that the Party is right,’ Fuchs said later, ‘and that in the coming struggle you could not permit yourself any doubts after the Party had made a decision.’ The Party decided he should go to England to finish his education. He arrived in Bristol that summer bearing a large bag of dirty laundry; he was housed by a local family with Party ties, and given an assistantship at Bristol University by a physicist there. He moved to Edinburgh, and Max Born’s lab, four years later. Fuchs now did solid work for Born and seemed less angry than when he had first come. Still, he was German and a Communist, so he was swept up in the net of British internment in May 1940 and transported to a camp in Canada, where he uncomfortably shared a barracks with Nazis. Released at the year’s end, Fuchs returned to Edinburgh, but soon thereafter he received an invitation from Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham, asking that Fuchs join him for work on a secret project. ‘We knew what it was,’ recalled Born. ‘I told him of my attitude to such kind of work and tried to warn him not to involve himself in these things. But he was filled with a tremendous hatred, and accepted.’ He was given security clearance to begin work on the atomic bomb in May 1941.14
‘When I learned the purpose of the work,’ said Fuchs later, ‘I decided to inform Russia and I established contact through another member of the Communist Party.’ Fuchs was given over to a handler named S. D. Kremer (Fuchs knew him as ‘Alexander’), who was military attaché at the Soviet embassy in