Klaus Fuchs

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Klaus Fuchs, 1951

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (born December 29, 1911 in Rüsselsheim am Main , † January 28, 1988 in East Berlin ) was a German-British nuclear physicist and Soviet spy .

After fleeing Germany and graduating in physics in Great Britain, he later played a major role in the American-British Manhattan project . In parallel to his research activities, he helped the Soviet Union develop its own atomic bomb as a spy . In 1950, Fuchs was charged with espionage in Great Britain and sentenced to 14 years in prison. After his pardon in 1959, he moved to the GDR , where he exerted influence on research policy.

Life

Klaus Fuchs was born the third of four children of the social democratic, Lutheran theologian Emil Fuchs and was a godchild of Harald Poelchau , who later became a prison pastor and member of the Kreisau circle of anti-fascist resistance and was the guardian of his nephew Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski . Despite hostility and assaults from his classmates at the humanistic grammar school in Eisenach, Fuchs was committed to democracy and the republic from an early age and was a member of the SPD and the Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold . After graduating from high school, he studied mathematics and physics in Leipzig from 1930 to 1931 , from the winter semester of 1931 at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel and from March to August 1933 in Berlin at the Friedrich Wilhelms University. After the seizure of power on January 30, 1933 and the expulsion from the SPD, Fuchs became a member of the KPD . After the fire in the Reichstag (February 27/28, 1933), Fuchs escaped arrest only by traveling early in the morning to an event in Berlin. Although he was wanted on a wanted list in Germany, he managed to study in Berlin for another five months. In August 1933 he fled to Paris .

His cousin, who worked in Great Britain , had connections that enabled Fuchs to continue his physics studies in Edinburgh and Bristol and to live with his friends. He wrote his diploma thesis in 1936 with Nevill F. Mott in Bristol on the subject of cohesive forces in metallic copper .

Nuclear physicist in the UK and USA

Klaus Fuchs, around 1940

He found his way to nuclear physics in the years 1937–1941, after being offered a well-paid position as a scholarship holder with the physicist and later Nobel Prize winner Max Born in Edinburgh , where he received his doctorate in 1938. In the meantime he was interned in December 1940 by the British as an " enemy alien " in a Canadian prison camp. He continued his work on nuclear physics from May 1941–1943 as part of the British military nuclear program Tube Alloys at the University of Birmingham with Rudolph Peierls . There he got in touch in 1942 with Ruth Werner , agent of the Soviet military intelligence service GRU and reported on the atomic bomb projects in Great Britain and the USA until his exposure (1950).

After being in August 1942 British national had become, he moved in 1943 for his work on uranium - isotope separation and questions of implosion after New York and finally Los Alamos . He was instrumental in the development of the plutonium bomb Fat Man . After the completion of the work, he returned in 1946 back to the UK and the line took over the area theory in the nuclear research center in Harwell . There he dealt with the development of power reactors , including fast breeders . His achievements were recognized in 1950 by a proposal to accept him as a member of the venerable Royal Society . This did not happen, however, because in the same year he was exposed as a spy due to the VENONA project and not only sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for espionage for the Soviet Union, but also revoked his British citizenship. He presented his espionage activity until the end as an act of solidarity with the USSR, which he wanted to support in the fight against the Third Reich . Fuchs was of the opinion that through his actions he had prevented the use of nuclear weapons in the Cold War , since both sides were in possession of nuclear weapons through him.

After it had been assumed for more than 40 years after the Second World War that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist from the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos who had passed on information about the construction of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, the release and publication of the results confirmed of the VENONA project by the US military intelligence service the second - already suspected - spy Theodore Alvin Hall . Its Soviet code name was MLAD. Theodore A. Hall had given important material to the Soviet Union on the implosion method and other aspects of the construction of an atomic bomb in 1944. He was suspected as early as 1950, but at that time denied all charges and was never convicted.

It was only after the exposure and the confession of Klaus Fuchs that the FBI went to his contact Harry Gold , who in turn found David Greenglass and the married couple Julius and Ethel Rosenberg , née. Greenglass, opened. Gold's senior officer John, also known as "Yakovlev" - Anatoly Jatskow  - was the resident of the NKVD in New York for the entire duration of World War II . No one had ever found him there. Since these activities took place in the espionage area, which is fixed on secrecy, all information on these activities must be viewed with caution and, despite numerous revelations, still partly controversial.

Klaus Fuchs and John von Neumann proposed a design for a hydrogen bomb in 1946 , which was tested in Operation Greenhouse in 1951, but turned out to be a failure. The proposal used the X-rays from an atomic bomb, but differently than in the later Teller-Ulam design : it served to ionize a spherical shell made of beryllium oxide, which enclosed a deuterium-tritium mixture that was compressed in the process.

Nuclear physicist in the GDR

Klaus Fuchs' grave site

In 1959 Fuchs was pardoned and, accompanied by considerable media hype, traveled to his father in Leipzig in the GDR , although he had been offered some well-paid positions in the West. In the same year he married the widowed former department head for cadre issues in the SED Central Committee, Margarete Keilson . Until 1974 he was deputy director of the national research center Central Institute for Nuclear Research (ZfK) in Rossendorf and headed the theoretical physics department . In 1963 he was also appointed to the TU Dresden .

Fuchs had a great influence on the research policy of the GDR. He was a member of the Scientific Council for the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy . Since 1967 he was a member of the Central Committee of the SED , since 1972 also a member of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR , which made him head of the research area physics, nuclear and materials science from 1974 to 1978. From 1984 he was head of the scientific councils for energetic basic research and for fundamentals of microelectronics and he was one of the most respected scientists in the GDR. He received the Karl Marx Order , the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1971, the Gold Medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1981 and the National Prize in 1975 . In 1983 he became a member of the Committee for Scientific Questions on Securing Peace and Disarmament and an honorary member of the Research Council of the GDR . He died in East Berlin in 1988 . His urn was buried in the tomb "Pergolenweg", the memorial of the socialists , in the Friedrichsfelde central cemetery in Berlin-Lichtenberg .

The documentary film Fathers of a Thousand Suns was published about Fuchs in 1990 .

In the fictional drama by Carl Zuckmayer , The cold light . Drama in 3 acts (S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin et al. 1955), the main actor Kristof Wolters has clear parallels to the person of Klaus Fuchs and the drama is inspired by his career.

literature

  • "Furies of Progress"? In: Die Weltbühne 72 (1977), issue 41 of October 11, 1977, pp. 1285-1288.
  • Günter Flach : Klaus Fuchs - preserving his legacy. Academic colloquium of the physics class of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in memory of academician Klaus Fuchs on January 19, 1989, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1990.
  • Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski and Günter Flach (eds.): From atomic stalemate to a world free of nuclear weapons - in memory of Klaus Fuchs. Conference of the Leibniz Society and the Russian House of Sciences with the participation of the German Cybernetic Society, November 2011 in Berlin. trafo-Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86464-025-4 .
  • Ronald Friedmann: Klaus Fuchs. The man who wasn't a spy. The life of the communist and scientist Klaus Fuchs. Koch-Verlag, Rostock 2005, ISBN 3-938686-44-8 .
  • Emil Fuchs (father of Klaus Fuchs): My life. Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1957 (part 1), 1959 (part 2: A Christian fighting against fascism, for peace and socialism ).
  • Klaus Fuchs, Ruth Werner , Eberhard Panitz : Meeting Point Banbury or How the Atomic Bomb Came to the Russians. Das neue Berlin, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-360-00990-8 .
  • Horst Kant , Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Fuchs, Klaus Emil Julius . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Nancy Greenspan: Atomic spy: the dark lives of Klaus Fuchs , Viking 2020
  • Gert Lange, Joachim Mörke: An Interview with Science. Conversations with academicians about their lives and work. Urania-Verlag, Leipzig / Jena / Berlin 1979.
  • Peter Millar: God's fire. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2004 (Original: Stealing Thunder. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 1999).
  • Eberhard Panitz : Meeting Point Banbury or How the Atomic Bomb Came to the Russians. Klaus Fuchs, Ruth Werner and the greatest espionage case in history. Verlag Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-360-00990-8 .
  • Wolfgang Schreier (Ed.): Biographies of important physicists. A collection of biographies. Verlag Volk und Wissen, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-06-022505-2 .
  • Robert Chadwell Williams: Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), London 1987, ISBN 0-674-50507-7 .

Web links

Commons : Klaus Fuchs  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jeremy Bernstein, John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs: an Unlikely Collaboration, Physics Perspective, Volume 12, 2010, pp. 36-50
personal data
SURNAME Fuchs, Klaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fuchs, Klaus Emil Julius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British nuclear physicist, Soviet "nuclear spy"
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Ruesselsheim
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1988
Place of death Berlin