EAST GERMANY: Return of the Traitor

Though he was born a German, the British scarcely questioned the devotion of young Refugee Klaus Fuchs to democratic principles. His father was a Quaker theologian who had successively defied both the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler; his sister killed herself after helping her husband escape from a Nazi concentration camp. Young Fuchs was a brilliant theoretical physicist, won doctorates at both Bristol and Edinburgh. When World War II broke out, 31-year-old Fuchs, after first being interned in Canada, became a naturalized British subject and was soon recruited for Britain’s secret atomic research program.

Controlled Schizoid. For 2½ years he worked in the U.S. (partly at Los Alamos), returned to Britain in 1946 to be head of the theoretical physics department at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, was rated as the No. 3 atomic scientist in Britain. Then in 1950 British intelligence belatedly closed in. After a brilliantly conducted interrogation that played on his intellectual vanity. Traitor Fuchs seemed relieved to tell all.

Since 1942, Fuchs confessed, he had been a Russian spy—not for money (a mere $280 was all he got), but convinced that he was somehow serving to bring about and keep the peace. He admitted that he had passed on atomic secrets to Soviet agents in New York. Los Alamos and London (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in the U.S. for treason, were members of the Fuchs spy ring). He had not felt that he was betraying his adopted country or his many British and U.S. friends, said Fuchs, because he was able to keep his Communist and democratic loyalties “in two separate compartments” by a process he described as “controlled schizophrenia.”

Tried and found guilty of treason, Fuchs was stripped of his British citizenship and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment. In prison, where he picked up pin money as a librarian, Fuchs was said to have incurred doubts about Communism. Last week the tall emerald-green gates of Wakefield Prison in northern England swung wide to permit the departure of a black Morris sedan. In the rear seat, together with a police officer and a picnic hamper, sat Klaus Fuchs, at 48 a scrawny, balding man who blinked through thick-lensed, steel-rimmed prison glasses, set free after serving 9½ years, with time off for good conduct.

Prison Number. Reporters chased the Morris car 181 miles to London Airport, where Fuchs was hustled through customs and escorted by Scotland Yard men to a Convair of the Polish Airlines. Wearing a crumpled brown suit, a shirt too large at the neck, with a row of fountain pens in his breast pocket and carrying a canvas bag still stamped with his prison number, 3492, Fuchs handed the stewardess a oneway ticket to East Berlin.

Since Fuchs was no longer a subject, the British argue that they had no option but to let him go where he wanted: to East Germany to rejoin his 84-year-old father, who is now professor emeritus of the Red-run University of Leipzig. After refusing to talk to newsmen in Britain, on board his plane or when he landed in East Berlin, Klaus Fuchs finally gave an interview to a London reporter who tracked him down at a vacation cottage near East Germany’s Lake Wandlitz. Had he been decently treated in prison? “Yes.” Was he still a Marxist? That, said Fuchs, should be answered by his present whereabouts. Why had he passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union? “I don’t wish to say anything about that.” What were his plans for the future? Said Fuchs: “To take a job to help in the buildup of the new society here.”

In the House of Commons, Home Secretary Richard A. (“Rab”) Butler was asked whether he was satisfied that Fuchs’s “brain would be of no further use to the Russians.” In the fast-moving world of theoretical physics, Fuchs is considered way out of date, so Butler merely answered dryly, “I cannot extend my influence as far as that.”