Fritz Lange, Klaus Fuchs, and the Remigration of Scientists to East Germany

I describe the social and political framework in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in which the remigration of scientists and other scholars to East Germany occurred after the Second World War, between 1946 and 1959. Since these included only a small number of scientists, I illustrate the problems they encountered and the opportunities they were provided during their reintegration into GDR society by discussing in some detail the cases of two physicists, Fritz Lange (1899–1987) and Klaus Fuchs (1911–1988), both of whom remigrated to East Germany in 1959 but from very different countries, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, and under dramatically different circumstances.