After three months at Wormwood Scrubs, he was transferred to Stafford Prison, where he sewed mailbags, and then six months later, to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire. This is a prison for long-term prisoners, many of them, in the nature of things, violent criminals. As an eminent criminal much written about in the newspapers, he had considerable status among the prisoners when he arrived, and was treated with respect.
The long-term prisoners at Wakefield had individual cells, so he did not share one. He behaved in prison much as he did outside. He was quiet, reserved and self-contained; he did not mix much. He occasionally played chess with other prisoners, and because he was a skilful player he used to start without a queen, to give his opponent the advantage, but still he always won. A few prisoners doing correspondence courses in physics or maths asked his help, and he gave it. He also wrote some articles explaining physics in simple terms for the Wakefield Prison magazine, and acquired the nickname ‘the Doc’. He was assigned congenial work in the prison library.
He used to read a lot, particularly Marxist classics. He had some long talks on philosophical questions with one of the assistant governors, Gordon Hawkins, who had a degree in philosophy and did postgraduate work in the subject at Balliol College, Oxford. Fuchs would expound the philosophy of dialectical materialism. He gave Hawkins In Defence of Materialism by Georgi Plekhanov, one of the classics of Marxist philosophy, to read and they discussed it.
They talked about world affairs as well as philosophy. Fuchs followed the Rosenbergs’ case, and when they were sentenced to death he remarked that he was lucky that he had not been convicted in America; there, he would have been executed.
He noted Sir Winston Churchill’s famous depiction in 1955 of the thermonuclear balance of terror, after both America and Russia had exploded a hydrogen bomb: ‘A paradox has emerged. Let me put it simply. After a certain point has been passed, the worse things get, the better. The broad effect of the latest development is to spread almost indefinitely, or at least to a great extent, the area of mortal danger… Then it may well be that, by a process of sublime irony, we shall have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.’
Fuchs pointed this out to Hawkins, and said, ‘I suppose the process of sublime irony won’t extend to my being released, as a benefactor of the human race.’ It was a wry joke. Fuchs, by helping the Russians build the atomic bomb, had certainly done his bit to put balance into the terror.
When the first sputnik went up, and there was some fanciful talk of the exploration of space and putting men on the moon, Fuchs explained to Hawkins lucidly and patiently why this was impossible. You might send a rocket to the moon, he explained, but you could not bring a vehicle back because of the heat that would be generated when a fast-moving object hits the Earth’s atmosphere. He even made some rough calculations to demonstrate the point. Once again, he had underestimated the resources of modern technology. He could foresee the re-entry problem, but not that it would be solved.
He discussed his crime with Hawkins, and said again that he regretted deeply having betrayed his friends at Harwell and, in particular, Henry Arnold. He said nothing about any other betrayal.
After Fuchs had served some years, Hawkins asked him what he intended to do when he got out. Fuchs said he could not stay in Britain now that his British nationality had been taken away. (This was not necessarily so.) He said he did not want to go to a country in the Communist bloc, and in any case he could not. ‘I couldn’t go east of the Iron Curtain because over there I’m regarded as being largely responsible for the arrest of Harry Gold and David Greenglass, and for the execution of the Rosenbergs,’ he explained.
He noted that Alan Nunn May had gone to teach at the University of Ghana after he was released from prison, and that J. B. S. Haldane, a leading British biologist and long-time Communist who had recently broken with Communism, had gone to India. The idea of going to the Third World appealed to him. ‘I think I’ll go to India,’ he told Hawkins. ‘There, I could do useful work, and they are neutral in the East — West conflict, which is where I stand.’
But this is not what he did. We can trace through Fuchs’s own words the path that led away from his belief in Communism and his service in its cause. The path that took him back to Communism and service to the Communist Party once again, and to East Germany, is buried out of sight.
It may be important that he never worked out his regret for what he had done and his distaste for the state of mind that had inspired him in political terms. The nearest he got was a rejection of all political ideology: ‘Blame me, and if you can’t do that, blame Hitler and Karl Marx and Stalin and all their blasted company,’ he had written to Arnold. For someone who is not ready for despairing resignation or the detachment of a Candide, and who needs a coherent view of society, ‘a plague on all your houses’ is not a satisfactory stance. It may be relevant that his father came and visited him twice in prison in Britain, and told him that he would like him to come to East Germany, and he would be allowed to do so. Also, he may have felt suddenly the need for a homeland.
Under British prison regulations, a prisoner who does not get into any trouble in prison or offend against the regulations is entitled to remission of one-third of his sentence for good conduct. Fuchs satisfied these conditions, and so he served only nine years and four months.
Shortly before his sentence came to an end, Peierls wrote to him offering to help him find a job in England, but he received no reply. Arnold visited him in Wakefield, at the request of MI5, and offered to help him sort out any financial affairs. Fuchs told him how hurt he was at being deprived of his British citizenship. He said he would have liked to remain in England, but now he would probably go to East Germany. He said he was still a confirmed Marxist. He said he thought that in East Germany, government officials often attained their positions because of their standing in the Communist Party rather than their ability, and this was wrong. He wanted the intelligentsia to have more voice in Government affairs in East Germany, and he wanted to lead a campaign to ensure that they did. This was the old Fuchs, who was going to tell the Soviet leaders what was wrong with their system.
Fuchs left Wakefield Prison on 23 June 1959. The prison authorities and the police are permitted, in exceptional circumstances, to facilitate a prisoner’s journey to wherever he wants to go to start a new life. A police car drove Fuchs straight from prison to Heathrow Airport, where he boarded a Polish airliner for East Berlin. An Associated Press reporter got on the plane. Fuchs told him: ‘I wish to say that I bear no resentment against Britain or any Western country for what has happened.’ Again, this sounded like the old Fuchs, and the old arrogance. He felt that it was for him to display or dispense with resentment.
He was met at the airport in East Berlin by Klaus Kittowsky, who was now a university student, and they drove together to see his father. Then he went to a health resort for a rest. He had money in the bank in England, which he presumably transferred.
Fuchs was not a Philby or a Maclean, a spy coming in from the cold. His world was that of science, and this was the world to which he returned. He was offered, and accepted, the post of Deputy Director of the Institute of Nuclear Research at Rossendorf, a small town in pleasant wooded countryside near Dresden. He was also to lecture at the Akademie der Wissenschaften, an academic institute in Dresden.
He applied for membership in the German Communist Party, and was accepted. He married now, a woman who had been a student at Kiel University with him, Margaret Keilson. She also was a Communist Party member. Despite this apparent orthodoxy, it is noteworthy that although Fuchs has often travelled to other countries in the Communist bloc since he went to East Germany, he has never travelled to any country outside the bloc. Presumably, the authorities do not trust him sufficiently to allow him to go.