135 Facts About Rudolf Hamburger

Rudolf Albert Hamburger was a German Bauhaus-inspired architect.

Rudolf Hamburger 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.

Rudolf Hamburger 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".

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

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

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

Rudolf Hamburger 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.

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

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

Rudolf Hamburger 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.

Fellow students, as Rudolf Hamburger later recalled, included alongside the 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.

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

Rudolf Hamburger stayed in Berlin after graduating, taking a job as a construction manager with the Prussian Building and Finance directorate.

Rudolf Hamburger found himself drifting away from the conservatism of others in the architectural profession, and drawn towards the optimistic radical pacifist idealism represented by artists such as Kathe Kollwitz.

Rudolf Hamburger's application was successful and in July 1930, armed with a contract to work as an architect with the SMC, he emigrated with his wife to Shanghai.

Shanghai was riding a construction boom in which Rudolf Hamburger was able to participate fully.

Rudolf Hamburger found his SMC employment better paid than his private work, and he found that his monthly salary was 50 Taels higher than that of other architects employed by the Public Works Department.

The renewed contract kicked in in August 1933 after which Rudolf Hamburger was the second-best architect employed by the council.

In Shanghai, Rudolf Hamburger produced four large buildings and several smaller ones.

Rudolf Hamburger's first major building, which he was permitted to work "quite independently", was a nine-storey apartment block to accommodated 70 nurses.

Rudolf Hamburger's third major commission, the vast cruciform Ward Road Jail complex, was an entirely different proposition, meeting an entirely different set of requirements and challenges, but Rudolf Hamburger's imagination and attention to detail, along with his exploitation of modern knowledge and materials, were again on display.

Rudolf Hamburger had travelled to China from Berlin by train, via Moscow, setting off in December 1928 and ending up in Shanghai in May 1929.

Rudolf Hamburger served as an architectural consultant on the project.

Rudolf Hamburger would meet up with Chen Hansheng one last time, half a lifetime later, visiting Beijing as an East German tourist in 1964.

Rudolf Hamburger's involvement seems to have evolved more on a step by step basis.

Rudolf and Ursula Hamburger worked hard demonstrating solidarity with the Chinese population.

Rudolf Hamburger started work with "The Modern Home" on 6 June 1933.

Rudolf Hamburger organised a new facade along with characteristically colourful and comprehensive renovation of the interior.

Rudolf Hamburger was given the cover name "Sonja", and received appropriate political and technical schooling.

Ursula Rudolf Hamburger was providing a communications link to Moscow for Chinese partisan groups engaged in fighting the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.

Rudolf Hamburger was faced with having to decide whether to renew his contract with the SMC for a further five years.

Rudolf Hamburger's existing contract would otherwise expire in April 1936.

Rudolf Hamburger had by now become a convinced communist and was keen not to remain "politically inactive" for any longer: Ursula informed her Moscow handlers of this development.

Rudolf Hamburger agreed to stand by Ursula, at least till the birth of her child, despite the extramarital nature of her pregnancy.

Rudolf Hamburger visited the visa office in Warsaw almost on a daily basis for several weeks, and it was necessary to obtain agreement from his friend, the Polish architect Szymon Syrkus to act as a guarantor: after several months of effort, and more than forty visits by Rudolf, the officials finally issued the Hamburgers with twelve-month visas.

Rudolf Hamburger signed a similar contract with a London based specialist architecture journal.

Some sort of financial arrangement with Spiwall was nevertheless devised, and Rudolf Hamburger did most of his partnership work from home.

Rudolf Hamburger did draw up plans for a substantial ten dwellings unit for his partner, and found professional work in Krakow.

Rudolf Hamburger traveled to Warsaw only a couple of times each month.

Ursula Rudolf Hamburger was well aware of what was going on, but she herself never fell victim to Stalin's paranoia.

Rudolf Hamburger subsequently wrote that his contribution to Soviet intelligence during the time in Poland was in effect restricted to the help he was able to give his wife.

Rudolf Hamburger spent the summer across the Atlantic, visiting his elder brother, Viktor who had been settled as a professor of Embryology at Washington University in St Louis since 1935.

Rudolf Hamburger continued to contribute material to the specialist architecture journals in Paris and London.

Finally, in the first part of 1939 Moscow agreed that Rudolf Hamburger might undertake intelligence work with direct links to the service.

In 1939 Rudolf Hamburger was determined not to be downhearted when it transpired that his GRU contact man in China was to be the man who had been his former wife's lover and the biological father of his wife's second child:.

On 20 April 1939 at Marseilles Rudolf Hamburger boarded the ship that would take him to Asia.

Viktor Rudolf Hamburger had been based in Missouri since 1935 but the third brother, Otto Rudolf Hamburger, was now living in Shanghai.

Rudolf Hamburger toured around, taking in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Saigon, and then in July 1939 took a passage on a coastal boat from Saigon to Shantou from where he made his way on to Shanghai.

Rudolf Hamburger was still in Shanghai in November 1939, having stayed there "longer than intended, as a result of the war".

Rudolf Hamburger was finding some architectural work, but only for very modest residential accommodation.

Patra and Rudolf Hamburger, therefore, decided to look for candidates in other cities.

Rudolf Hamburger set out to find the doctor so as to be able to win him for the communist cause with a face-to-face talk.

Rudolf Hamburger intended then to follow a land route from Chongqing Xi'an.

In March 1940 Rudolf Hamburger traveled with his luggage to Hong Kong.

Rudolf Hamburger was able to collect it from them two days later.

Rudolf Hamburger unexpectedly came across a German acquaintance and a rich Chinese woman whom he had known in Shanghai.

Rudolf Hamburger found time to send a letter to his father in Shanghai.

Rudolf Hamburger left the radio device and other technical equipment with his acquaintances in Chongqing.

Rudolf Hamburger convinced several to go to Manchuria in support of his political mission.

Rudolf Hamburger was intending to make his new base in Manchuria.

Rudolf Hamburger was keen to make contact with Patra back in Shanghai in order to be able to report on what he had achieved.

The "blue-eyed naivete" Rudolf Hamburger repeatedly demonstrated during his first and last serious intelligence mission provide implicit support for the assessment of his strengths and weaknesses which the Soviet intelligence directorate had presumably carried out ten years earlier.

Otto inferred that his brother Rudolf Hamburger and been arrested and was in danger of being disappeared.

Rudolf Hamburger communicated the news to Rudolf's "communist friends" and the information was presumably passed through to Moscow.

Rudolf Hamburger was held in a wooden building that was attached to a police station in Chongqing for approximately three weeks.

Rudolf Hamburger was interrogated about who he was, who had sent him and what he was doing.

Early in the morning, after approximately three weeks in the "wooden shack" at the police station, Rudolf Hamburger was driven away in a large limousine to a formerly private estate in the countryside outside the city.

Rudolf Hamburger was permitted to enjoy the view for fifteen minutes each day, through the two bars that had been placed across the window of the front room on the ground floor where he was taken for his "daily walk".

Rudolf Hamburger later described his incarceration in this manor house as relatively benign, though he reported that all the detainees, including him, fell ill with Malaria.

Rudolf Hamburger's cell-mate had ended up in detention as the ringleader of an illegal street protest.

At the start of February 1941 Rudolf Hamburger took the flight to Moscow.

Rudolf Hamburger was now accommodated with others in a Dacha settlement a short distance outside Moscow.

Sometimes lecturers "came out from Moscow" But some of the most important lessons came from discussions with fellow students who, like Rudolf Hamburger, had already had the benefit of a certain amount of experience in the field.

Rudolf Hamburger was keen to continue to Turkey as instructed, but with international tensions rising in the area the Turkish authorities reacted negatively to his Honduras passport, and he encountered difficulty obtaining a visa.

Rudolf Hamburger sought out contacts among the British and American officers and soon developed friendships with them, in pursuit of his information-gathering mission on behalf of his handlers.

Rudolf Hamburger used to pass on his findings in face-to-face GRU middlemen stationed at the Soviet embassy in Tehran.

Early in 1943 an Iranian friend who worked as a simultaneous translator for one of the heads of the American transport and logistics operation invited Rudolf Hamburger to start working as an "informal collaborator".

Around two weeks later Rudolf Hamburger found himself arrested by American military police.

Rudolf Hamburger calculated that there was little on that tape that might have incriminated him, and his interrogators evidently agreed.

Around the same time Rudolf Hamburger came across an English military officer in Tehran for whom he had worked in Shanghai ten years earlier.

The man had then been working for the British Colonial Police in the Shanghai International Settlement and had been involved in the construction of a new jail which Rudolf Hamburger had been building.

From that it followed that Rudolf Hamburger's unmasking in Tehran as a Soviet agent could only be a matter of time.

Rudolf Hamburger was now detained and taken to a small military camp just outside the city.

Rudolf Hamburger tried to demonstrate his innocence, but the investigators came back with more accusations that he had worked for "other" intelligence services.

Rudolf Hamburger lost twenty kilos : he was badly affected physically and mentally.

However, Rudolf Hamburger became aware that his conviction carried an additional three letter tag that identified his as a "socially dangerous element".

Fellow camp inmates were produced to back-up the evidence of the "Stukatsch" brigade leader that Rudolf Hamburger had been distributing anti-Soviet propaganda.

Together with the routine badmouthing of the poor treatment, terrible food and the generally bad situation in the camp, Rudolf Hamburger was therefore identified as an "enemy of the state".

In May 1945 Rudolf Hamburger was taken to the Karaganda region, far to the east in Kazakhstan.

Rudolf Hamburger gained the impression that Karaganda was the main camp at the heart of a large network of labour camps covering an area of approximately 33,800 square kilometers.

Rudolf Hamburger lived one of the former farmhouses in the old village.

Rudolf Hamburger was set to work in a design office with other prisoners.

Rudolf Hamburger put his heart and soul into the project, ending up with a design for a gatehouse of which he was very proud.

Rudolf Hamburger was now set to work as one of approximately ten inmates in a drawing office belonging to a furniture factory.

Rudolf Hamburger was taken north, to the Ural foothills and placed in a lumber camp near Solikamsk and the Kama River, where he was given responsibility for buildings maintenance.

Rudolf Hamburger was sent to a labour camp near an abandoned city.

Rudolf Hamburger prepared the plans for the furniture, the lighting and the overall interior design.

Rudolf Hamburger was able to supplement his basic labour camp wage by painting little water colour drawings as picture postcards for fellow inmates.

Rudolf Hamburger launched a major drive to organise the camps according to a national set of precepts and structures, consciously prioritising economic aspects of the system.

Rudolf Hamburger had been arrested less than two years before the end of the war.

Rudolf Hamburger was not permitted to send or receive letters.

In July 1947 Viktor received a letter from a Polish woman who reported that Rudolf Hamburger was alive and "working as an engineer".

Rudolf Hamburger was trying to contact Rudolf's brother, Viktor, in Missouri.

Rudolf Hamburger reported on his meeting with Rudolf Hamburger at Camp Kama in 1950.

The letter asked, in passing, if Rudolf Hamburger was a US citizen and if this could be evidenced.

Dauns wrote that Rudolf Hamburger had been sentenced to 25 years of hard labour for espionage.

Rudolf Hamburger was permitted to name the place, within the Soviet Union, to which he wished to be released.

Rudolf Hamburger had been given no advanced notice of this development and had to think very fast.

Rudolf Hamburger was stateless, he was not a prisoner of war and he was not even a former party member.

On his release Rudolf Hamburger moved to a small Ukrainian city where he lodged with a farmer's wife identified as "Galja".

Rudolf Hamburger was employed there in the Buildings Department of the Ministry of Food.

Rudolf Hamburger's contribution appeared with others from East German architects who had visited the Soviet Union only as tourists.

Rudolf Hamburger did refer to his experiences of the vast industrial buildings erected in the Donets basin and implicitly referred back to some of the things he had seen as a prisoner.

Rudolf Hamburger was able to enter into a correspondence with his ex-wife, but further contact outside the Soviet Union was not so easy.

In February 1954, still in Kamensk, Rudolf Hamburger managed to get a letter through to Richard Paulick who had returned to East Berlin from Shanghai in 1949.

At some stage Rudolf Hamburger Hamburg picked up a copy of Pravda and read about the East German architects' visit.

Rudolf Hamburger did not fit neatly into any of the "usual categories".

Rudolf Hamburger had never actually been a member of the Communist Party.

Rudolf Hamburger was not one of those who had emigrated as a political refugee directly from Nazi Germany to Moscow in the 1930s.

On his arrival in East Germany Rudolf Hamburger lived, from 5 July 1955, as a tenant at the Berlin apartment of his friend Richard Paulick.

Rudolf Hamburger remained there only for a couple of weeks.

Rudolf Hamburger immediately applied for membership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

Rudolf Hamburger needed to find two sponsors for his party membership and the Ministry for State Security needed to investigate him to make sure he did not have any guilty secrets in his history.

Rudolf Hamburger received his card as a "candidate for party membership" in March 1956.

Ministry for State Security files on Rudolf Hamburger refer to information held by the Party Central Committee or "elsewhere", without spelling out more detail, beyond the high level statement that he was "active in the anti-fascist movement" and had been accepted for membership by the Party Central Committee.

Rudolf Hamburger was accepted as a full party member in March 1958.

Rudolf Hamburger undertook one or two further architecture commissions, now on a freelance basis.

Nevertheless, after he retired Rudolf Hamburger began to compile an autobiographical volume detailing his experiences between 1930 and 1955.

Rudolf Hamburger was, as he himself insisted, not a natural author, but he nevertheless had a compelling series of tales to tell.

The East German authorities invited Rudolf Hamburger to exploit his new-found fame by producing a volume of his own, but what was envisaged was a piece of propaganda controlled by the government, and Hamburger rejected the offer with an uncharacteristic absence of courtesy.

Rudolf Hamburger was nevertheless furious that Ursula's book concentrated on Ursula's espionage success.

Rudolf Hamburger felt that it unjustifiably played down his own contribution to their espionage partnership between 1930 and 1940.

Rudolf Hamburger's body was buried in a place of honour in the city's Heidefriedhof, close to the graves of Hans and Lea Grundig.

Ten years later, as the Soviet Union approached the final flight path to implosion, Rudolf Hamburger was posthumously rehabilitated by Moscow in 1990.