Everybody behaved perfectly
Eric Hobsbawm
- BuyScientist Spies: A Memoir of My Three Parents and the Atom Bomb by Paul Broda
Troubador, 333 pp, £17.50, April 2011, ISBN 978 1 84876 607 5
This is an unusual and illuminating contribution to the literature on Soviet espionage that has become part of Anglo-Saxon folklore. All the more so as it is written from the point of view of the spies rather than their hunters. It is about four people: the author, a retired biochemist of distinction, and the ‘three parents’ whose times shaped his life. They were Hilde, or Hildegard Pauline Ruth Gerwing, and the two physicists she successively married, who passed information to the Soviets on the atom-bomb project between 1942 and 1945: Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who probably had the longer record of relations with Moscow, was never tried though seen as heavily suspect by the British security services.
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Vol. 33 No. 16 · 25 August 2011 » Eric Hobsbawm » Everybody behaved perfectly
pages 17-18 | 3236 words