Fuchs To Be Released At End Of Month

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28921, 15 June 1959, Page 11

Fuchs To Be Released At End Of Month

(Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON, June 12. Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the first United States atom bomb while passing Western nuclear secrets to Russian agents, will finish his 14-year prison sentence for spying at the end of this month.

The slightly-built scientist will be free to settle in any country which will admit him. Fuchs, who is 47, was deprived of his British nationality in gaol and is a stateless person, although born in Germany. Friends from Wakefield Gaol, Yorkshire, are reported to believe he will go behind the Iron Curtain, to join his 85-year-old Quaker father, Dr. Emil Fuchs, in Leipzig, East Germany. Although he was given the maximum sentence of 14 years in 1950, Fuchs has served only nine years four months, one third of his sentence being automatically remitted for good behaviour. “The Doc,” as other prisoners call him, wrote regularly for the prison magazine and gave a series of evening classes in science. Last November, a reporter who managed to get a clandestine interview with him in prison quoted him as saying. “I am still a convinced Marxist. But I can’t now accept everything they (the Communists) do and say.” Fuchs said then he did not want

to stay in Britain, partly because “I could never get a worthwhile job here.”

Dr. Fuchs was born near Frankfurt in 1911. He joined the German Communist Party as a young man and worked underground against the Nazis before fleeing to France in 1932 and England in 1933.

He was interned in 1940 and sent to Canada, but released in 1942 and recruited for Britain’s atomic research programme. He was naturalised the same, year and sent to the United States, where he worked in New York and Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the first atom bomb. In 1946, he became deputy scientific director of Britain’s atomic energy research station al Harwell, a job he held until his arrest in 1950. Some scientists believe the information he passed to Russian agents gave the Soviet Union its first atom bomb five years ahead of schedule. He did not spy for money, but for his Communist ideals.