8 - Klaus Fuchs, Rothstein once more, and Charles Brasch

Summary

Klaus Fuchs was an outstanding physicist and atomic scientist with degrees in mathematics and physics from the universities of Leipzig and Kiel. A committed communist, Fuchs had been a member of the German Communist Party (KPD) since 1932; he had once been badly beaten up by student Brownshirts at Kiel University and thrown into the nearby river. On 28 February 1933, the day following the Reichstag fire, a warrant was issued for his arrest and Fuchs went underground before fleeing to Paris and then to Britain. ‘I was lucky,’ Fuchs recalled years later, ‘because on the morning after the burning of the Reichstag I left my home very early to catch a train to Berlin for a conference of our student organisation [KPD], and that is the only reason why I escaped arrest. I remember clearly when I opened the newspaper in the train I immediately realised the significance and I knew that the underground struggle had started. I took the badge of the hammer and sickle from my lapel which I had carried until that time.’ He was ordered abroad by the KPD, and told to concentrate on his studies in preparation for the new communist Germany that, they believed, would follow the collapse of the Hitler regime. ‘I was sent out by the Party, they said that I must finish my studies because after the revolution in Germany people would be required with technical knowledge to take part in the building up of the Communist Germany.’