Jürgen Kuczynski

Jürgen Kuczynski (17 September 1904 – 6 August 1997) was a German economist, journalist, and communist.

He also provided intelligence to the Soviet Union during World War II.

Born in 1904 in Elberfeld (Wuppertal), Germany, Jürgen Kuczynski was the eldest of the six recorded children born into a Jewish family headed by economist and demographer Robert René Kuczynski and his wife, painter Berta (Gradenwitz) Kuczynski.

(The Independent described his father as a banker.) The children were gifted, and the family was prosperous.

Between 1910 and 1916 Kuczynski attended a private school in Berlin-Zehlendorf, before progressing to an academic secondary school in the city.

He completed his schooling in 1922 and went on to study at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg.

His subjects included Philosophy, Statistics and Political economy.

German universities were strongholds of the völkisch movement, and though Kuczynski was a secular Jew, he discovered during his time at Erlangen University that he was not welcome as most of the faculty and the students made it very clear that to them he was just a Jew.

Kuczynski was advised not to eat in the student cafeteria and in his diary in 1924 he wrote he felt very keenly of "being Jewish in racial terms", going on to write: "I think I'm the only 'stranger', meaning Jew in town. People turn their heads when they see me walking in the streets".

Kuczynski often noted that, though he refused to identify with Judaism as a religion, his "Jewish appearance" as he called it - as he had facial features commonly associated with people of Middle Eastern descent - led others to automatically assume that he was Jewish.

In a letter to his parents in 1925, he wrote, "it is virtually impossible to go into a café here without being verbally abused by anti-Semites."

In common with many other Jewish intellectuals at the time, Kuczynski grew interested in Marxism with its promise of an utopian society where there would be no more nationalism or religion, and hence the entire "Jewish Question" would be rendered moot.

From 1925 onward, he started to read various Marxist tracts.

In April 1925, during a visit to Paris, he took part in a demonstration organised by the French Communist Party against the Rif war, which was fired upon by the Paris police, an incident that increased his sympathy with Communism.

Despite the incident, Kuczynski wrote that no other city in the world "has the magic, the vitality of Paris".

In Paris, Kuczynski met the satirist Kurt Tucholsky.

Tucholsky, like Kuczynski, longed for a world without the "Jewish Question", and believed that Marxism, which promised to dissolve all forms of national identify in favor of class struggle, offered the opportunity for that world.

Despite his Communist sympathies, in October 1925 Kuczynski went to work at the Bett, Simon & Company bank as an intern, where he did well and was rapidly promoted up the corporate ranks.

Kuczynski was soon donating some of his pay earned at the bank to the German Communist Party, the irony of which did not escape him.

At a showing of the 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, Kuczynski met the Soviet cultural minister Anatoly Lunacharsky and the economist Yevgeny Varga, who became one of Kuczynski's closest friends.

In 1926, he published his first book and began to contribute articles to the journal Finanzpolitische Korrespondenz where his left-wing views were readily apparent.

Through his parents, he became active in the League for Human Rights, a front organisation for the German Communist Party run by Willi Münzenberg who soon became a major intellectual influence on the younger Kuczynski.

Besides Münzenberg, Kuczynski met other prominent people who were members of the League such as Albert Einstein, Ludwig Quidde, and Carl Mertens.

In 1926 he traveled to the United States as a research student, undertaking post-graduate studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

He followed this with work leading the economic department of the American Federation of Labor until 1929, gaining practical experience.

Jürgen's sister Ursula, also known as Ruth Werner, became a spy who worked for the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s.

The family lived in a small villa in the Schlachtensee quarter in the south-west of Berlin.

Growing up in a family of left-wing academics, as an adolescent Jürgen Kuczynski met numerous scholars and activists, including communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Kuczynski was deeply influenced by the values of bildungsbürgerlich, an untranslatable German term for the values of the German upper middle class that emphasized cultivating a cultured, humanist outlook on life together with a love of nature and aestheticism.

By 1936, Kuczynski had followed his father and other family into exile in England.

After being temporarily interned as an enemy alien at the start of World War II, during the war he was recruited by the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, to recruit German communists to be sent to Germany to make contact with resistance groups.

He also served in the US Army as a colonel in its Air Force, on a team conducting the Strategic Bombing Survey.

At the same time he passed their results "to Soviet intelligence."

In 1942 he recruited Klaus Fuchs to Soviet intelligence and introduced the physicist to his sister Ursula Kuczynski (aka Ruth Werner), who had become a "star agent" of the Soviet Union.

She acted as Fuchs's courier for four years, but as far as is known she was never placed under surveillance by MI5, and was not prevented from leaving England in 1950 shortly before Fuchs went on trial.

After the war, Kuczynski initially returned to Germany on assignment with the US Army, first serving in the American zone of what became West Germany.

Appointed to an academic position by the Soviet authorities, he settled in East Germany.

He joined the "Communist-dominated Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED)", which directed him to work in academic and cultural affairs.

He became one of East Germany's leading intellectuals after the war, maintaining his Marxist faith and communist affiliations.

He wrote prolifically and is credited with nearly 4,000 titles.