Shortly after this, the Conservative Chancellor, Franz von Papen, dismissed the elected Social Democratic Government of Prussia, the largest German state, sending in police to drag the members out of their offices. Fuchs went to the Communist Party headquarters and found old friends from the SPD Reichsbanner there, ready to take to the streets to fight for Social Democracy in Prussia, all of them turning to the party that seemed to be taking the most active role in resistance to the Right. But the Prussian Social Democrats limited their resistance to an appeal to Germany’s Supreme Court.
Fuchs joined the Communist Party, accepting now the need for party discipline in the fight against Nazism. His brother Gerhardt and his sisters Elizabeth and Kristel joined in the same year. They all discussed their reasons with their father. He disagreed with their decision, but he was not entirely unsympathetic, for he also was disappointed in the Social Democratic leaders’ attitude to the Nazi threat.
Fuchs was motivated, as many others were at the time, not only by fear of Nazism but also by the hope offered by Communism. It is important that in 1932 the most dramatic horrors of Soviet Communism that were seen from the West — the purges, the mass deportations — were still in the future. Arthur Koestler, who was later to analyse the Communist mentality perceptively and profoundly, joined the German Communist Party at this time, as a journalist in Berlin, and he recalled in his autobiography: ‘Russia was still regarded as “the great experiment”; one could have reservations about the regime and be critical of it, but there was no prima facie case for rejecting it out of hand. Only the conservatives and reactionaries did that.’[1]
For a while, in the late 1920s, things had seemed to be stabilizing in Germany. But then came the Depression in America, and its repercussions in Europe. Capital was withdrawn from German industry, millions of people were thrown out of work and the economy went into decline. There were strikes, and Nazis and their opponents fought savage battles in the streets. In this time of national distress and near-despair, people sought strong leadership. When parliamentary elections were held in 1932, more people voted for the Nazi Party than for any other party, although the Nazis still did not have a majority of seats. The Social Democrats were the biggest minority party, with the Communists in next place. The following January, when another coalition government fell apart, von Papen, who had resigned as Chancellor a few months earlier, urged President Hindenburg to offer the office of Chancellor to Hitler, assuring him that these wild men of the Right would be tamed by the responsibilities of office, and Hindenburg took his advice.
Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 with a coalition cabinet, including members of other parties, and the democratic institutions remained in existence. But if these had seemed shaky before, they were enfeebled now. Hitler used his emergency powers to ban Communist Party meetings, and called another parliamentary election for March. His Brownshirts stepped up their thuggish activities in the streets.
At Kiel University the Nazis staged a strike against the rector, and Brownshirts from the town joined in the demonstrations on the campus. Fuchs deliberately showed himself before them. He was taking a risk; the Brownshirts had killed political opponents. As it was, they beat him up and threw him in the river.
At home, the members of the Fuchs family decided that they would not talk politics among themselves. Life was becoming dangerous, and they did not want to know too much about one another’s activities or contacts, because they could not know how they would respond to interrogation. This inhibition became ingrained, so that fifteen years later, in a very different world, when Emil Fuchs visited his son in England, where he was a scientist holding a senior position, he found that somehow they still shied away from talking about politics.
On the night of 27 February, a mentally unbalanced Dutch tramp with unknown accomplices set fire to the Reichstag, the parliamentary building in Berlin, and what was left of democracy in Germany was consumed in its flames. Even while the building was still blazing, the Nazis blamed the fire on the Communists, and started a reign of terror against opposition parties, arresting 4,000 Communists in the next twenty-four hours. (Evidence was given at the Nuremberg war crimes trials that the Nazis themselves started the Reichstag fire, using the Dutch tramp as a tool.)
Fuchs caught an early train to Berlin the following day, to attend a meeting of student Communists, and read about the fire in a newspaper on the train. He realized the significance right away: the Communists and Social Democrats had both warned that the Nazis might stage a stunt in order to have an excuse to curtail the democratic process in the coming election. He took off the hammer and sickle badge that he was wearing in his lapel and put it in his pocket; from now on, one could not be a Communist openly in Germany.
The meeting in Berlin was held in secret. Fuchs’s superiors in the party praised him for his work, and told him he should go abroad and complete his studies, because one day a new, post-Hitler Germany would need qualified people.
He did not return to Kiel after the meeting. He could not go abroad immediately, so he hid in the apartment of a young woman party member. It was a terrible time for him. The Nazis’ terror tactics had ensured their victory in the March election, and Germany was being transformed into a Nazi dictatorship. The bully boys who had beaten him up on the streets of Kiel were now the Government.
His fellow Communists and other anti-Nazis were being arrested, beaten, tortured and murdered, and this must have included friends of his.
He was distressed by how little opposition there was. He wrote later, in his confession: ‘Not a single party voted against the extraordinary powers which were given to Hitler by the new Reichstag[2] and in the universities there was hardly anybody who stood up for those who were dismissed either on political or racial grounds, and afterwards you found that people whom you normally would have respected because of their decency had no force in themselves to stand up for their own ideals or moral standards.’ His evident disillusionment must have strengthened his conviction that liberal principles were not strong enough to withstand the force of Nazism; that only the Communist Party could fight it effectively, and tight discipline was necessary in the struggle.
One of those dismissed from his post on political grounds was Emil Fuchs. The leaders of the Lutheran Church accepted the Nazi regime, and in many cases made common cause with it (Nazi publications quoted Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish tirades), but a small minority of the clergy dissented.
Emil Fuchs was distancing himself from the Lutheran Church on religious as well as social questions. He now doubted the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and sought a more direct link between Man and God which did not go by way of miracles and a Messiah. He had been interested for a long time in the Society of Friends, and had many contacts among them. In 1933 he joined the Society, and after this conducted Quaker services.
Klaus Fuchs was in Berlin for five months, in hiding. Then, in August, he went to Paris, to attend an anti-fascist conference under the chairmanship of the French writer Henri Barbusse. The party told him to go; he said later that he was ‘sent by the party’. He had very few belongings and very little money, and when he crossed the border, he knew he could not go back.
He was only twenty-one. It must have taken strong nerves, and all the self-assurance his father had noted, to keep his head. He was exiled from his country. All the things that made up the structure of his life — family, friends, career, political activities — had vanished, and he was alone and penniless.
2
This is unfair. When the Enabling Act to give extraordinary powers to Hitler came up in the Reichstag, some Socialists were under arrest, but eighty-four attended and voted against the Act, despite browbeating and threats by the Nazis.