Klaus Fuchs

Klaus Fuchs was a German-born physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and the British atomic bomb project during World War II. He was also a Soviet spy who passed vital information on the development of the nuclear weapons to the USSR. He was arrested and convicted in 1950, and served nine years in prison in the UK. After his release, he moved to East Germany, where he continued his career as a physicist and a scientific leader. Fuchs was born in Rüsselsheim, Hesse, Germany, on 29 December 1911, the third of four children of a Lutheran pastor and a professor of theology. He studied physics and mathematics at the Universities of Leipzig and Kiel, and joined the German Communist Party in 1930. He was expelled from the party in 1932 for opposing its alignment with Stalinism, but remained a committed communist. He fled to the UK in 1933, after the Nazi rise to power and the Reichstag fire. He received his PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Nevill Francis Mott, and his DSc from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked as an assistant to Max Born. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, he was interned as an enemy alien in the Isle of Man, and later in Canada. He returned to Britain in 1941, and became an assistant to Rudolf Peierls, working on "Tube Alloys"—the British atomic bomb project. He began passing information on the project to the Soviet Union through Ursula Kuczynski, codenamed "Sonya", a German communist and a major in Soviet military intelligence who had worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring in the Far East. In 1943, Fuchs and Peierls went to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project—the US-led effort to develop the atomic bomb. In August 1944, Fuchs joined the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of implosion, necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. He also contributed to the design of the hydrogen bomb. After the war, he returned to the UK and worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell as head of the Theoretical Physics Division. He continued to pass information to the Soviets through Harry Gold, an American courier who also worked with David Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg. In January 1950, Fuchs confessed that he had been spying for the Soviets over a seven-year period beginning in 1942. A British court sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment and he was subsequently stripped of his British citizenship. He was released in 1959, after serving nine years, and migrated to East Germany (GDR), where he was welcomed as a hero by the communist regime. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) central committee. He was later appointed deputy director of the Central Institute for Nuclear Physics in Dresden, where he served until he retired in 1979. Fuchs died of a stroke in East Berlin on 28 January 1988, at the age of 76. He was buried at Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin, where many prominent communists are interred. His life and espionage activities have been the subject of many books, films, documentaries and dramas. He is widely regarded as one of the most successful spies of the Cold War era.