Fuchs’s sister in America, Kristel Heineman, recovered from her illness, married a second time and had three more children. Among others involved in Fuchs’s story, Harry Gold was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for his role as a courier. He was brought out of prison to give evidence at the Rosenbergs’ trial, and also at the trial of his former boss, Abraham Brothman, who was said to have passed secrets to Soviet agents. He was paroled in 1966, and died of heart disease in Philadelphia in 1972. Sir Rudolf Peierls moved to New College, Oxford, in 1963 and retired in 1974, and is now Professor Emeritus at Oxford University and the University of Washington in Seattle; at the time of writing he still travels widely. Lady Peierls accompanied him on his travels, until she died of a brain disease in October 1987. Sir Nevill Mott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977. Herbert Skinner died in 1960 at the age of fifty-nine; his wife Erna died in 1975, of an asthma attack, at a gathering in the home of a friend from Harwell days. Henry Arnold retired from Harwell and went to live in the seaside town of Sandbanks, and died there at the age of eighty-eight. William Skardon retired to Torquay, and died there in 1988; MI5 had refused to allow him to write his memoirs.
Hans Bethe earned a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967; his younger colleague, Richard Feynman, was awarded one two years earlier. Otto Frisch died in 1981. Klaus Kittowsky added his grandfather’s name to his own and became Fuchs-Kittowsky, and followed an academic career; he is now a Professor of Information Technology at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Igor Kurchatov, hailed as ‘the father of the Soviet atomic bomb’, died in 1960 at the age of fifty-seven, heaped with honours — Stalin Prize, Order of Lenin, member of the Soviet Parliament. Jurgen Kuczynksi lives in retirement in East Berlin; he recently confirmed for a West German television team his role in putting Fuchs in contact with Soviet agents.
Fuchs retired in 1979. He remained in good health for some years, although he was even thinner than he had been, almost gaunt, and was balding. He devoted a lot of his time to the officially sponsored peace movement. This always follows the Party line, but it would be simplistic to dismiss all its participants as nothing more than puppets. Most of them have chosen the area in which they wish to express their concern, and this was Fuchs’s choice. He gave a number of lectures urging progress towards nuclear disarmament.
When the Soviet Congress of Scientists held a conference in 1983 in Moscow to discuss the prevention of nuclear war, Fuchs was invited as a guest speaker. Another guest invited from abroad was Josef Rotblat, one of the heads of the Pugwash Movement, founded to join scientists of the world in working against nuclear war, and Rotblat found himself sitting next to Fuchs. It was some time before he recognized him; he had not seen him since Los Alamos days, and he did not know him very well there. Fuchs, in his talk to the conference, recalled Niels Bohr’s letters to Roosevelt and Churchill pointing out the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Adhering always to Soviet orthodoxy, he also quoted Lenin, and denounced the SDI, the United States ‘star wars’ anti-missile defence programme.
Fuchs died suddenly, on 28 January, 1988, a month after his seventy-seventh birthday. The official announcement did not give the cause of his death.
The East German Press carried tributes to his work as a scientist and a political activist, but did not mention his espionage activities. ADN, the official East German news agency, carried a fulsome obituary, saying:
‘His scientific achievements in the field of theoretical physics and his consistent actions for Socialism and the maintenance of peace have brought him high national and international esteem.
‘As a Socialist scientist, university teacher, Communist and loyal friend of the Soviet Union, he participated for two decades, successfully and creatively, in the development of the power industry.’
East German newspaper readers, unless they had other sources of information, would have no idea of Fuchs’s principal contribution to the Communist cause.
Acknowledgment of this came six months later, in a Soviet television documentary about the Soviet atomic bomb programme shown during the first full flowering of glasnost.
Fuchs featured prominently in this film. It showed his participation in the wartime atomic bomb programme in America and said: ‘Fuchs knew that the bomb was a secret from Russia. He did not think this was right, and he gave data about the bomb to the Russians.’ It also showed footage of Fuchs in East Germany, reading a British newspaper, and said that up until the time he died, he never repented what it called his ‘awesome choice’. As we know, the truth is more complex.
Fuchs enjoyed an active retirement in his last years. He spent some time at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Dresden, working on its archives. Visiting scientists would occasionally see him there.
A French scientist visiting an East German university made a detour to call in at the Akademie, travelling by car. He met a number of scientists there, including Fuchs. Chatting with Fuchs about his trip, he said the detour had delayed him, so that the one-week permit he was given for his car would expire before he returned. However, he said, it would be a lot of trouble to renew it for two days more, and he did not think he would bother; probably, nobody would notice.
Fuchs took a firm, disapproving line. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that if you are in another country, you should obey its laws.’
Appendix: Klaus Fuchs’s Confession
War Office, 27 January 1950
Statement of Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs, of 17 Hillside, Harwell, Berkshire, who said:
I am Deputy Chief Scientific Officer (acting rank) at Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell.
I was born in Rüsselsheim on 29 December 1911. My father was a parson and I had a very happy childhood. I think that the one thing that mostly stands out is that my father always did what he believed to be the right thing to do and he always told us that we had to go our own way, even if he disagreed. He himself had many fights because he did what his conscience decreed, even if these were at variance with accepted convention. For example, he was the first parson to join the Social Democratic Party. I didn’t take much interest in politics during my school days except in so far as I was forced into it by the fact that of course all the other pupils knew who my father was, and I think the only political act at school which I ever made was at the celebration of the Weimar Constitution when there was a celebration at school and all the flags of the Weimar Republic had been put up outside, whereas inside large numbers of the pupils appeared with the imperial badge. At that point I took out the badge showing the colours of the Republic, and put it on, and of course it was immediately torn down.
When I got to the University of Leipzig I joined the SPD and took part in the organization of the students’ group of the SPD. I found myself soon in opposition to the official policies of the SPD, for example on the question of naval re-armament, when the SPD supported the building programme of the Panzercreuzer. I did have some discussion with Communists, but I always found that I despised them because it was apparent that they accepted the official policy of their own party even if they did not agree with it. The main point at issue was always the Communist policy proclaiming the united front and at the same time attacking the leaders of the SPD. Later I went to Kiel University. It has just occurred to me, though it may not be important, that at Leipzig I was in the Reichsbanner which was a semi-military organization composed of members of the SPD and the Democratic Party. That is a point at which I broke away from my father’s philosophy because he is a pacifist. In Kiel I was first still a member of the SPD, but the break came when the SPD decided to support Hindenburg as Reich President. Their argument was that if they put up their own candidate it would split the vote and Hitler would be elected. In particular, this would mean that the position of the SPD in Prussia would be lost when they controlled the whole of the police organization. The election was, I think, in 1932. My argument was that we could not stop Hitler by co-operating with other bourgeois parties but that only a united working class could stop him. At this point I decided to oppose the official policies openly, and I offered myself as a speaker in support of the Communist candidate. Shortly after the election of Hindenburg, Papen was made Reich Chancellor, and he dismissed the elected Prussian Government and put in a Reichstathalter. That evening we all collected spontaneously. I went to the headquarters of the Communist Party because I had in the meantime been expelled from the SPD, but I had seen many of my previous friends in the Reichsbanner, and I knew that they were gathering together ready to fight for the Prussian Government, but the Prussian Government yielded. All they did was to appeal to the central Reich Court. At this point the morale of the rank and file of the SPD and the Reichsbanner broke completely and it was evident that there was no force left in those organizations to resist Hitler. I accepted that the Communist Party had been right in fighting against the leaders of the SPD and that I had been wrong in blaming them for it. I had already joined the Communist Party because I felt I had to be in some organization.