Klaus Fuchs (29 December 1911-28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and Soviet agent who passed information from the American Manhattan Project to the USSR from 1942 to 1949.
Biography[]
Klaus Fuchs was born in Russelsheim, Hesse, German Empire in 1911, the son of a Lutheran pastor who was involved with the SPD. Fuchs joined the SPD's student wing and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold during the Weimar era, but his communist sympathies led to his expulsion from the SPD in 1932, and he joined the KPD. Fuchs went into hiding following the 1933 Reichstag fire and emigrated to Britain, where he attended the University of Bristol and the University of Edinburgh. After World War II broke out, Fuchs was interned on the Isle of Man and in Canada, but he returned to Britain in 1941 and worked on the British atomic bomb project. He passed information back to the Soviets via Ursula Kuczynski, who worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring, and, in 1944, he joined the theoretical physics division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His expertise was in the problem of implosion, necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. From 1943 to 1949, he passed on information to the USSR; after the war, he returned to the UK and worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell before confessing, in January 1950, that he had been a spy for the Soviets. He was sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment and as stripped of his British citizenship, and he was released in 1959 and migrated to East Germany, where he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and became a member of the SED central committee. He died in 1988.