Early years Ursula Maria Kuczynski was born in
Schöneberg, Berlin,
Prussia,
German Empire on 15 May 1907, The children were academically gifted, and the household was prosperous,
Librarianship, marriage and politics In 1926 and 1927, she attended a librarianship academy while working at a
lending library. She then took a job at
Ullstein Verlag, a large Berlin publishing house. However, she lost this job in 1928 after participating in a
May-Day Demonstration and/or on account of her Communist Party membership. Between December 1928 and August 1929 she worked in a New York book shop before returning to Berlin where she married
Rudolf Hamburger, an architect and fellow member of the Communist Party. It was also at this time that she set up the Marxist Workers' Library (MAB) in Berlin. She headed up the MAB between August 1929 and June 1930. to another German expatriate,
Richard Sorge, "Sonja" (the code name by which Kuczynski was known) operated a Russian spy ring under Sorge's direction. In Shanghai, she also met
Roger Hollis, who later became the director of
MI5, and
Manfred Stern, who had run a spy network in the United States and was now a military advisor to the
Chinese Communist Party. In Fall 1931, Ursula sent her son
Michael to live with her husband's parents (now relocated from Germany to Czechoslovakia) while she went to Moscow, where she undertook a seven-month training session before returning to China. They had settled in north
Oxford, but soon moved on to the first of a succession of nearby villages, settling initially in
Glympton, and then in
Kidlington. are buried in the
Great Rollright churchyard. Living in Oxfordshire placed them conveniently close to her parents and
Melita Norwood. Ursula thus hastened the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, Her communist sympathies were no secret, but British suspicions were insufficiently supported by evidence to justify her arrest. Her visitors were unaware of or unconcerned by her periodic, and apparently casual, meetings with Fuchs There was no mention of
Klaus Fuchs, who was still alive in 1976 An uncensored German language version came out only in 2006, In 1982 Ruth Werner became a member of the
East German affiliate of
PEN International. She seems never to have regretted or seen the need to apologize for her espionage. In 1956, when
Nikita Khrushchev made public the darker face of Communist Russia under
Stalin, she was invited to comment. She was reluctant to join the criticism of the Soviet wartime leader: She died in Berlin on 7 July 2000. Interviewed that year, a few months before her death, she was asked about the consequences of "
Die Wende", the changes which had led to German reunification (which many of her persuasion still saw as a peaceful annexation of East Germany by West Germany): ==Evaluation==