Rudolf Hamburger

Contemporary architects by whom he was particularly influenced during his two years in the Bavarian capital included Theodor Fischer (1863–1938), Gabriel von Seidl and German Bestelmeyer (1874–1942).

In 1890 his father, Max Hamburger (1868–1952), had inherited from an uncle one of the several textile mills in the town.

The administration offices and storage facilities were adjacent to the family home.

Rudolf Albert Hamburger (3 May 1903 – 1 December 1980) was a German Bauhaus-inspired architect.

In 1908, inspired by the "Krupp settlement" in Essen, the firm had built a model housing estate ("Siedlung") for the workers.

Hamburger would describe his upbringing as Liberal Jewish.

He was encouraged, as a child, to play with the children of the workers at the factory and, to the extent that he was politically engaged, he shared his father's progressive tendencies.

Many years later, after he died, an English friend would describe Rudolf Hamburger as "the last Victorian communist".

Rudolf Hamburger was taught to sketch by Friederich Iwan, a local artist, while he was still a boy.

During the 1920s the business employed 850 people.

Max Hamburger was for many years chairman of the local chamber of commerce and, unusually for his class, a committed activist in liberal politics.

Else Gradenwitz, the boy's mother, was a banker's daughter: she looked out for the women working in the factory and provided a kindergarten for their children.

The grandparents all lived in Breslau and vacation stays in the city were frequent.

He successfully completed his schooling and moved to Munich to study architecture in 1922.

The assassination of the Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, that year came as a particular blow.

Rathenau had been a close personal friend of his father's: the shocking event and the rising tide of right-wing extremism, which was particularly hard to miss in Munich, demonstrated the fragility of the new liberal-democratic political order.

He moved to Dresden in 1924 where he studied for around a year, and met Richard Paulick, a fellow trainee architect who became a close friend.

Their careers would frequently become entwined during the decades that followed.

In 1925 Hamburger and Paulick moved on to the Technical University of Berlin, where they shared lodgings.

They were taught by Hans Poelzig, whom the students idolised.

Poelzig renounced traditional teaching methods, instead holding classes in his studios at the Arts Academy, and giving his students tasks from his current commissions.

Fellow students, as Hamburger later recalled, included alongside the (relatively) conventional German students, a Croiatian, an Austrian aristocrat, a Japanese who designed interiors in meticulously co-ordinated pastel shades, an anarchist and a Hungarian girl with a completely unjustified belief in her own genius.

Often the group round his table also included a tall polite young man, a reticent and likeable youth keen, like the others, to master the architect's craft.

During 1926, while a student in Berlin, Rudolf Hamburger met Ursula Kuczynski, a qualified bookshop assistant.

An unusual bookshop assistant, his new friend was also one of the six children of the distinguished demographer René Kuczynski.

She had joined the Communist Party in May 1926 when she was just 19.

Ursula was deeply committed politically and possessed of a formidable intellect.

The two became friends and then lovers.

Rudolf Hamburger emerged with a degree in 1927.

Many of his most important commissions were undertaken in Shanghai where he lived and worked between 1930 and 1936.

Late in 1930, his wife Ursula Kuczynski was recruited to work for Soviet intelligence; he supported her espionage related activities in various practical ways until their divorce in 1939, after which he became involved with spying for the Soviets on his own account.

The students, and almost everyone else, would learn more about Albert Speer after 1933.

By 1943 he had ended up in Tehran where British forces were present in large numbers.

Imprisoned successively by American forces and British forces, when he managed to get away he made for the Soviet Union in order to seek asylum.

Three days after arriving in Moscow he was arrested.

He spent the next ten years in a succession of labour camps, and after a further two years in "internal exile" was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1955.

He moved to Dresden and resumed his architectural career.

Rudolf Hamburger is known to students of espionage as the first husband of Ursula Kuczynski, celebrated in some quarters as "Stalin's best female spy" ("Stalins beste Spionin").

Rudolf Hamburger was born at Landeshut, a small town on the southern edge of Lower Silesia.

He was the second of his parents' three recorded children, all of them boys.