Jürgen Kuczynski (; 17 September 1904 – 6 August 1997) was a German economist, journalist, and communist activist. He also provided intelligence to the Soviet Union during World War II.
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 Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, 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.
Early life Born in 1904 in Elberfeld, a subdivision of Wuppertal, 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 Kuczynski (née Gradenwitz). (The Independent described his father as a banker.) The children were gifted, and the family was prosperous.
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, 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.
Education 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 Communist Party of Germany (, abbreviated KPD), the irony of which did not escape him. In 1926, he published his first book and began to contribute articles to the journal 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 KPD 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. 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 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. In 1927, his father visited the Soviet Union and was astonished to be asked if he was in any way related to the J. Kuczynski who had written the "excellent" articles on the problems of modern capitalism in the Finanzpolitische Korrespondenz. In the same letter, the older Kuczynski advised his son to start learning Russian because what he had seen in the Soviet Union had left him convinced that "Soviet Russia is the future".
Journalism and communism Kuczynski returned to Germany in 1929 and settled in Berlin. In 1930 he joined the KPD. Between 1930 and 1933 he contributed to the party newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, in its information department and as its economics editor, joining the editorial board in 1931. Kuczynski wrote extensively, and he shared the economic analyses that he produced for the newspaper with the Soviet ambassador. The German scholar Axel Fair-Schulze argued that values he grew up with "...inoculated Kuczynski against becoming a die-hard Stalinist, despite being politically in tune with the Stalinist line...While he was a faithful Stalinist on the surface, Kuczynski almost instinctively refused to become a mere party soldier".
In January 1933 the Nazi Party took power and quickly set up a one-party state in Germany. Membership of political parties (other than of the Nazi Party) became illegal, and the ban on political parties was enforced with particular effect in respect of (former) Communist Party members. During the next few years, the government increasingly adopted anti-Semitic policies.
During 1933 many German communists were arrested and imprisoned, while many others left the country to avoid the same fate. Sources indicate that as early as February/March 1933 Kuczynski and his wife discussed following his parents and four of Jürgen's five sisters in emigrating to Britain, but they decided to stay in Germany and participate in anti-fascist resistance. During the next three years, their work became increasingly illegal as the government's anti-democratic agenda was enacted.
Kuczynski continued to provide analytical work on economic and social developments in Germany for the benefit of Communist Party national leaderships. These were made available to Soviet institutions, used in Soviet newspapers, and employed in propaganda. He was also active in the (Revolutionary Union Opposition) movement until it was completely suppressed in 1935. The risk to Kuczynski of being arrested and having his home ransacked by government agencies was pressing and constant. During this period he also traveled to Moscow in 1935. Finally, in January 1936, emigration could be put off no longer and he moved to Britain, joining his father. Recent scholarship confirms that the timing of his move to London was triggered by instructions received from Moscow. In 1936, Kuczynski started to work as a spy for Soviet military intelligence, the Main Intelligence Directorate (, abbreviated GRU).
English exile Publications Within Britain his contribution to left wing politics included work on the magazine Labour Monthly, an organ of the Moscow-oriented Communist Party of Great Britain. His international academic reputation gained him access to British establishment figures including, according to one source, Winston Churchill, who became prime minister during the war. Kuczynski became a natural leader for the German communists who had sought refuge in the UK from Nazism. He maintained regular contacts with the exiled KPD leadership which, during the second half of the 1930s, was based in Paris; he met with them there to exchange ideas. Kuczynski who was fluent in English handled relations between the KPD exiles in Britain and the CPGB.
In the spring of 1939, he published in London The Condition of the Workers in Great Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union, 1932-1938, a comparative study of the working classes in the three nations written from a Marxist perspective. The book was divided into sections, the first of which compared Britain to the Germany as he called both "finance capital countries" with Britain "is ruled by finance capitalism as a whole and by democratic methods" while Germany "is ruled by the most reactionary section of finance capitalism, the heavy industries, the armament industries and by dictorial methods". Kuczynski argued based upon a detailed economic study that productivity for the average worker in Britain rose by 20% between 1932-1937 and in Germany worker productivity rose by 11% in the same period, which he attributed to the fact that many British workers belonged to unions that fought for better treatment while German workers had only the Nazi pseudo-union, the German Labour Front, that represented the interests of management.