The arrival was not a happy one. The authorities in Quebec were not at first aware that there were anti-Nazi refugees on board, and thought that they were receiving dangerous Nazis that the British wanted out of the way. The Ettrick was met by armed soldiers who lined up the passengers at bayonet point, searched them thoroughly and kept them under close guard. Some also pilfered their belongings. (A year later the Canadian and British Governments jointly paid compensation to those who were robbed.) Some of the more sophisticated among the Canadian soldiers were puzzled by the presence of three rabbis among these supposed Nazis.
They were all sent to a camp at Sherbrooke, on the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec City, with a magnificent panoramic view of the St Lawrence River and the hills beyond. It was a Canadian Army camp which was adapted for internment purposes by ringing it with barbed wire and a wire fence.
The occupants were certainly treated as prisoners, and occasionally bullied by guards. Restrictions were placed upon them — on the amount of mail they could send and receive, for instance — and one mentally unbalanced young man who had been in a concentration camp was shot dead trying to escape, in a tragic accident that was hushed up at the time. Yet in many ways life was not all that unpleasant, and most of the internees were aware that their relatives and friends in their homeland were suffering very much worse. They were eating considerably better than they had in Britain, where wartime rationing was in force, and they were spared the dangers and discomfort of air raids on British cities. The internees were for the most part a highly educated and motivated group. They organized camp activities, musical entertainments and a camp university. They also organized high school classes for some young people who had been coming up for their matriculation exams when they were pulled out of school.
Intellectual life flourished. One inmate was elected a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge while he was in the camp, and another received his PhD there. (This is not the place to go into details but, judging from the subsequent achievements of Camp Sherbrooke alumni in many fields, this must have been the most remarkable assemblage of intellect ever to have been gathered in one prison. Just for instance, when the steady state theory of the nature of the universe was propounded by three astronomers and physicists, Thomas Gold, Sir Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle, it turned out that two of them had been Sherbrooke internees: Gold, who is now Director of the Centre for Space Research at Cornell University, and Bondi, who some years after having been deported from Britain as a potentially dangerous alien, became Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Defence.)
The camp authorities appointed as the prisoners’ spokesman Prince Friedrich of Prussia, Count Lingen, a grandson of the Kaiser, an anti-Nazi German who had been studying farming methods in England when war broke out. The other internees regarded their prince as something of a curiosity, but he was always decent and courteous in his behaviour and was well liked. It was said that he gained some influence over the camp commandant (who read outgoing mail) by writing letters to the wife of the Governor-General of Canada, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, addressing her as ‘Dear Aunt Alice’. Certainly his Aunt Alice sent him a football, at his request, for the inmates to use.
Fuchs was unusual among the internees, although not unique, in that he was not Jewish. He said later that he resented being interned along with Nazis, of whom there were a number in the camp, but in general he showed little bitterness and understood the anxieties of the British Government of the time.
Being among Germans again, he reverted to his Communist past and dropped his concealment of his Communist beliefs. He used to attend the regular weekly discussion meeting of a group of Communists and fellow travellers which was formed in the camp, although he rarely spoke at these meetings. The leader of the group was Hans Kahle, a German Communist who had commanded the Eleventh International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Kahle was one of the celebrities of the camp, widely liked and admired by Communists and non-Communists alike. He had been a friend of Ernest Hemingway in Spain, and Hemingway sent him an inscribed copy of his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, while he was in the camp.
Fuchs was called on by the organizers of the camp university to give lectures in physics, which he did, mostly to scientists in other fields. His lectures were lucid and well attended. Apart from this he remained a loner, spoke little and made few friends. However, he was liked, and an affectionate diminutive was added to his name — he was called ‘Fuchslein’, which means ‘little fox’. When fellow internees recalled him long afterwards, when he was arrested as a spy, one called him an ‘oddball’, another ‘aloof’ and another said simply that he was ‘reserved’. One, Martin Wallich, who was a BBC radio producer by then, expressed surprise that the authorities had not known he was a Communist, since his membership in Kahle’s group at the camp was no secret.
Apart from his participation in this group, there was one other link between Fuchs and the world of professional Communists, which was none of his doing. He was corresponding with his sister Kristel, who had emigrated to America. She was now married and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She talked about Fuchs to people she knew, and one of these, Wendell Furry, told her he had a brother-in-law in Canada, and would ask him to contact Fuchs. This brother-in-law was Israel Halperin, a mathematics professor at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. Halperin sent Fuchs some magazines, although the two never met. When the Soviet spy ring in Canada was broken in 1946 Halperin, a member of the Canadian Communist Party, was found to be acquainted with several of those convicted. Police searched his home and found an address book containing Fuchs’s name.
Kristel wrote to Fuchs saying: ‘I hope to see you now that you are in the Western hemisphere.’ But Born in Edinburgh was pressing for his release, as others pressed for the release of other internees. Six months after the camp was established the first group of 287 inmates were freed and sent back to England, and Fuchs was among them. (So were Count Lingen and Kahle.) They sailed from Halifax on Christmas Day, on the Belgian ship Thysville. Fuchs was able to resume his work at Edinburgh University.
In the spring of 1941 Fuchs received a letter from the Professor of Mathematical Physics at Birmingham University, Rudolf Peierls, another German refugee a few years his senior who had recently become a British citizen. Fuchs knew Peierls slightly, having met him when he visited Bristol University, and again at Edinburgh. It was a letter that was to change his life; what Peierls was doing in Birmingham was to change all our lives. To appreciate the significance of this letter, it is necessary to recall some of the background of events.
By the early 1930s physicists had worked out the internal structure of the atom: a nucleus of protons and neutrons, with electrons whirling around it in orbits. They began to manipulate these particles, using their electrical properties. They built machines that could project them, through electrical attraction or repulsion.
Physicists do not discover the behaviour of these particles by observing them, in the way that biologists observe minute living cells. No one has ever seen an atom, let alone one of its constituent particles, and no one ever will. They do it by analysing the effects of the motions of these particles, on the basis of what they presume to be the reality of the sub-atomic world. They produce these effects by experiments, a process often requiring extraordinary ingenuity and imagination.