I.

In January 1953 two important letters were sent regarding the wartime activities of the East German communist Jürgen Kuczynski, who had been a leading figure in the London group of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) (also known as the ‘English emigration’) from 1936 to 1944. The first, dated 13 January 1953, was written by Wilhelm Koenen, himself a veteran KPD member and fellow London exile of Kuczynski, and was addressed to Hermann Matern, Politburo member and chairman of the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK). In it Koenen denounced Kuczynski as an imperialist agent who had worked in London for the American military and for the ‘Jewish-Trotskyist’ newspaper Left News, owned by the ‘anti-Soviet propagandist’ Victor Gollancz.Footnote ¹ The second, dated 23 January, was from a senior figure in the Security Service (MI5) in London to his counterpart in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in West Berlin. As the recipient was informed, the British security services believed that the East German regime was about to embark on a major purge of Jewish communists, some of whom might be tempted to defect. The individuals of greatest interest were Kuczynski himself, his sister Ursula, also known as Ruth Werner or ‘Sonya’, her husband Leon Beurton, and another former member of the KPD in Britain, Johanna Klopstech. All four had been involved in Soviet military espionage during the war and were associated in particular with the famous atom spy Klaus Fuchs, who had been arrested in London in February 1950. As the letter continued:

As these two letters indicate, the beginning of 1953 was an extremely dangerous time for Kuczynski. Already forced out of his position as President of the German–Soviet Friendship Society in 1950 because of his middle-class Jewish background,Footnote ³ he became increasingly vulnerable to attack from within the ranks of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) following the trial of Rudolf Slánský in Prague in November 1952 and the Doctors’ Plot in Moscow in January 1953. Of these, the Slánský trial was probably the more menacing to Jewish communists in East Germany, not only because it was geographically much closer, but because it represented the culmination of several years of persecution of party members across the Soviet bloc who had been in western exile before 1945 or who were suspected of having had contacts with western intelligence agencies during and after the war. To summarise briefly, eleven of the fourteen leading Czechoslovak party functionaries accused of high treason and ‘bourgeois nationalist’ or ‘Zionist’ connections during the Slánský trial were Jewish, a fact which was repeatedly mentioned in the indictments against them; and six had lived in London for at least some of the period 1937 to 1945. Guilty verdicts were passed on all of the defendants; eleven were handed death sentences which were carried out on 3 December 1952, and the remaining three were given life terms.Footnote ⁴ The Doctors’ Plot in Moscow followed on from this, and involved an imagined conspiracy by a group of Jewish doctors to murder the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin. Only Josef Stalin's death on 5 March is believed to have prevented a mass deportation of Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East as part of the ongoing campaign against ‘Zionism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’.Footnote ⁵

Kuczynski was personally threatened by these developments in a number of ways. In particular he was associated, at least ideologically, with Paul Merker's pro-communist Free Germany Movement (Bewegung Freies Deutschland) in wartime Mexico, which was now under investigation by the East German authorities as an alleged front for ‘Zionist–US imperialist’ interests.Footnote ⁶ Merker, a non-Jew and former Politburo member, had already been expelled from the party in August 1950 because of his wartime contacts with the supposed American ‘spy’ Noel Field. Known for his strong support for Jewish victims of Nazism, he was cited as a co-conspirator by several of the defendants during the Slánský trial, and was arrested by the Stasi three days after the final verdict was delivered on 27 November 1952.Footnote ⁷ Worse still, in the 1930s and early 1940s Kuczynski had had regular dealings with two of the main defendants in the Slánský trial, Ludvík Frejka (Ludwig Freund) and André Simone (Otto Katz), and had met them once more – along with Bedřich Geminder and Evžen Löbl – in Prague in 1949. As a good communist he immediately informed Walter Ulbricht and Matern about these contacts, also admitting to having seen Simone on one other occasion when the latter was undertaking a lecture tour in East Germany in the late 1940s.Footnote ⁸ Of course he denied having known anything of their ‘treasonous activities’. Nonetheless, it is significant that Koenen's letter to Matern on 13 January also deliberately tried to make the connection Frejka–Merker–Kuczynski.Footnote ⁹

Finally, on 1 March 1953 the ZPKK drew up plans for a fresh trawl through the records of all party comrades who had been in western exile during the war, on the grounds that the earlier investigations of 1949–50 had been ‘insufficient’, especially given the ‘new facts’ (or rather false denunciations) that had come to light since the Slánský trial.Footnote ¹⁰ As part of this process, Kuczynski was singled out, alongside other western émigrés including Franz Dahlem and Gerhart Eisler, for special investigation by the ZPKK at a Politburo meeting on 17 March.Footnote ¹¹ In addition to his contacts with ‘unreliable’ persons, the ZPKK was also interested in his alleged work in recruiting German communists for American-led special operations in 1944–5,Footnote ¹² and in his ties to the former (and future) British Labour member of parliament Konni Zilliacus, who had been denounced as an ‘agent of the British Intelligence Service’ during the Slánský trial.Footnote ¹³ Hans Schrecker, a fellow London exile who had already been arrested in November 1952 in connection with the Slánský trial and was held for several months at Hohenschönhausen jail, later recalled that during his interrogations he was repeatedly called upon to confirm that ‘comrades such as Wilhelm Koenen, Heinz Schmidt, Grete Wittkowski, Siegbert Kahn, Jürgen Kuczynski . . . [and Walter] Janka had engaged in espionage activity with me’.Footnote ¹⁴

Given all this, there seems little doubt that MI5 were right to suspect that Kuczynski could be at serious risk during the anti-Zionist campaigns in East Berlin in early 1953.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet surprisingly, he is barely mentioned, if at all, in many of the key works on the East German purges, including expert analyses by Hermann Weber, George Hodos, Jeffrey Herf, Peter Grieder and others.Footnote ¹⁶ One explanation for this is that Kuczynski was not, in the end, arrested, severely reprimanded or expelled from the party; unlike Merker, Dahlem, Eisler and others, he survived the Stalinist period in East Germany seemingly untouched. Another is that Kuczynski himself does not mention any of the events documented below in his numerous memoirs and autobiographical works, although he writes at great length about other, more public run-ins he had with the party at later stages in his career. Finally, Kuczynski was not a Zionist, and, in contrast to his non-Jewish party colleague Merker, had never expressed support for German financial restitution to Jewish victims of Nazism living in the United States and Israel.Footnote ¹⁷

Even so, I find the omission of Kuczynski from the standard works quite curious, especially as his dealings with the ZPKK in 1953 have much to tell us about the nature of the internal party purges in late Stalinist Eastern Europe, and about their important legacy for the individuals and regimes concerned.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, were the purges driven by central directives from Moscow or by local power struggles? Were the victims picked out randomly as a result of malicious denunciations or personal vendettas, or were they selected on a more deliberate and systematic basis? What role did anti-Semitism, and/or the construction of new enemy images (Feindbilder) and new spy scares in the early cold war period play? And finally, what was the personal impact of the purges on those like Kuczynski who narrowly avoided becoming victims themselves? Did the experience make them feel angry on behalf of less fortunate friends and colleagues? Did it strengthen or damage their faith in the communist cause as a whole? And did it give them any real appreciation of the dangers that they too had been exposed to?

Before going on to examine these issues in further detail, however, it will first be necessary to say a little bit more about Kuczynski's life prior to 1953, and in particular about his activities in the London KPD group in the 1930s and early 1940s.

II.

Jürgen Kuczynski was born in 1904 into a middle-class Jewish family in Elberfeld, in the Rhineland, and grew up in Schlachtensee, an affluent suburb to the west of Berlin. His father, Robert René Kuczynski, was a famous German statistician and demographer who sympathised with various progressive causes and played a prominent role, alongside the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and KPD, in the 1926 referendum campaign supporting the dispossession of the former princely households.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1933, using his strong international academic connections, Robert René fled to Britain where he taught at the London School of Economics until 1941 and worked closely with Harold Laski, an influential figure on the left of the Labour Party. He also briefly chaired the Free German Movement (FDB), a ‘popular front’ of KPD, SPD and non-aligned German leftists founded in London in 1943.Footnote ²⁰ Jürgen was his eldest child and only son, but he also had five daughters. Ursula, as we have seen, worked as a Soviet agent in Britain during the Second World War and, among other things, acted as a courier for Fuchs, the famous atom spy. She was awarded the honorary rank of colonel in the Red Army and, like her brother, spent her later life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) where she established a successful career as a writer. The four other Kuczynski sisters stayed in London and at least three of them were active members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) until its demise in the early 1990s.Footnote ²¹

Jürgen himself was a gifted Marxist scholar in the German bildungsbürgerlich tradition, with a Ph.D. in economics and a keen interest in labour history. He first joined the KPD in Berlin in 1930 and after a period of underground activity for the party in the early to mid-1930s, he arrived in London in 1936. Here he served in the leadership group of the KPD until 1944, acting as Pol. Leiter (political leader) until 1939, and again from June 1940 to July 1941, when he was replaced briefly by Heinz Schmidt, and then by his friend Siegbert Kahn. At the same time – and unknown to his party colleagues – he also worked for Soviet military intelligence, introducing his sister to Fuchs in 1942.Footnote ²² In 1945 he returned to Berlin, first in American army uniform as an officer working for the US Strategic Bombing Survey, and later as a civilian employee of the US Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS). In 1946 he resigned from OMGUS in order to take up a chair in economic history at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, and in 1950, following the arrest of Fuchs in London, he moved permanently from West to East Berlin and became a GDR citizen. He also served as a Volkskammer deputy until 1958, while quickly establishing himself as East Germany's best-known historian and public intellectual, with (literally) hundreds of publications to his name.Footnote ²³

During his entire academic career, which lasted well beyond his formal retirement in 1969, he was constantly in and out of favour with the SED party elite, most notably in the late 1950s, when he clashed with Kurt Hager – the party's ideology chief – over the question of objectivity and partisanship in Marxist–Leninist historical writing. In his post-1945 memoirs he described himself as a linientreuer Dissident – a dissident who loyally toed the party line – although in truth he was the exact opposite of this: a staunch communist and party loyalist who rarely followed the prevailing political line.Footnote ²⁴ Yet while his later clashes with Hager are well known and well documented,Footnote ²⁵ far less has been written about an earlier run-in he had with the party in London in 1944, leading to his removal from the London leadership group in July of that year.

The chief point of contention lay in the London group's attitude towards the domestic German resistance to Hitler, and its position on the future of Germany after the defeat of Nazism more generally. This in turn was connected to different interpretations of the meaning and practice of proletarian ‘internationalism’ at a crucial turning point in European and world history. According to Kuczynski, a group around Koenen, Heinz Schmidt, Schrecker and Hager had adopted an overtly anti-German position, which was based on a combination of Vansittartist thinking in Britain and the work of the bellicose writer and propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg in the Soviet Union. Additionally they were influenced by the ‘strong anti-German mood’ among Austrian and Czech party comrades in London; indeed Koenen, Heinz Schmidt and Schrecker had originally come to Britain via Czechoslovakia, Schrecker in Czech military uniform. Their view seemed to be that the entire German people, and not just the Junker and monopoly capitalists, were responsible for the rise of the Nazis, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.Footnote ²⁶ In April 1944 Heinz Schmidt had even sent an open letter to the exiled Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš expressing a sense of ‘shame’ on behalf of the FDB that ordinary Germans had ‘permitted the enslavement of [your country] and [are] in no way contribut[ing] to the shortening of the war’. Meanwhile Koenen, who was the most senior German communist in Britain at that time, and Hager, who was then more junior, voiced similar views in the FDB's newspaper Freie Tribüne in which they bemoaned the lack of serious organised German opposition to Hitler, even among the working class.Footnote ²⁷

By contrast, Kuczynski favoured the view taken by the Politburo member Merker and his Mexico-based Free Germany Movement, a line which was far less pessimistic when it came to the question of how democracy might be restored in Germany after the overthrow of the Nazi regime. In particular Merker, in his two-volume book Deutschland: Sein oder Nicht Sein?, published in Mexico City in 1944–5, and also in an exchange of letters in the Mexico group's newspaper Freies Deutschland in 1945, had rejected Koenen's theories on the ‘reactionary role of the German people’ in bringing about the Hitler dictatorship, describing them as a ‘dangerous exoneration of those who really are responsible . . . traitorous leaders of former political and trade union organizations, monopoly capitalists, the Junkers, and the Nazi gangsters’. He also declared that his ‘faith in the good and decent core of our people [and] in the German working class’ remained ‘unshaken’ in spite of the failure of any mass proletarian resistance against National Socialism.Footnote ²⁸

German Social Democrats in London were equally divided over these issues, although Kuczynski deliberately avoided close contact with them, to the extent that he even declined to join the anti-fascist Free German Movement chaired by his father.Footnote ²⁹ Instead his focus was entirely on the debate within the KPD. His own support for Merker can already be seen in a letter he published in Left News in April 1944 in which he argued against ‘the dismemberment of Germany’ and in favour of ‘preserving the unity of the Reich’, a goal he thought could still be achieved ‘through the efforts of the German people’. The German nation, he argued, could still ‘prove to the world and to itself that it has changed its ways of thinking and acting’, so long as it was given a chance; it was not irrevocably bound to Hitler and the Nazi regime.Footnote ³⁰ Later, in a private letter to Merker in February 1945, he railed against those German communists in England who had abandoned their sense of patriotism:

Meanwhile, this debate had already led to serious internal dissension in the London KPD group, during the course of which Kuczynski and Kahn were voted out of the leadership in July 1944, with Kahn being replaced as Pol. Leiter by Hager.Footnote ³² Two months later Kuczynski was called upon by the party to account for a further article he had written in Left News arguing for the maintenance, rather than dismantlement, of the military-oriented industrial trusts created by the Nazis as a means of reconstructing post-war Europe along peaceful, democratic lines.Footnote ³³ For a while he withdrew from active politics and journalism, instead concentrating on his work as statistical adviser to the US Strategic Bombing Survey which in early 1945 took him first to liberated France, and then to occupied Germany.Footnote ³⁴ In his memoirs he writes that the 1944 disputes over the ‘national question’ and the meaning of proletarian ‘internationalism’ were of little importance after the war, and that the KPD leaders Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck had gone out of their way to approve his position against that of Koenen, Heinz Schmidt and Hager when he first reported to them in Berlin in August 1945.Footnote ³⁵ What he fails to mention, however, was the time in 1953 when he was questioned by the ZPKK about these issues during the course of their potentially life-threatening search for a spy in the English emigration group.

III.

Was Kuczynski identified as a possible co-defendant in an East German Slánský trial in early 1953? Certainly the evidence uncovered by historians such as Hodos, Grieder and others shows that such a trial was being actively prepared in the first half of 1953, with Soviet agents initially taking the lead in interrogating Merker and then, with the enthusiastic help of Ulbricht and Matern, pushing the East German party into a more active search for co-conspirators and fellow traitors from within its own ranks.Footnote ³⁶ Kuczynski would have made an ideal target for the SED at this stage – Jewish, middle class, in western exile during the Nazi years, four sisters still living in Britain (his mother and father both died there in 1947), allegedly close to the ‘Zionist’ Merker, and with known contacts to the Americans. He was also extremely good friends with another figure who had already been singled out by the Soviets for closer examination, the Jewish communist and former American exile Eisler.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, according to notes made by Rudolf Herrnstadt, a Politburo member at the time, the Soviet special adviser Vladimir Semyonov had severely berated the SED leadership in late 1952 or early 1953 because of its failure so far to find any incriminating material against Eisler, whom he clearly suspected of being an American spy.Footnote ³⁸

Unfortunately, though, the records do not allow an unequivocal answer in relation to the level of threat faced by Kuczynski personally. Instead, all that is available is the transcript of his interrogation by the ZPKK on 20 July 1953.Footnote ³⁹ The date is striking, as it occurred over four months after the Politburo's initial decision to refer him for investigation, four months in which much had happened to change the political atmosphere in the GDR and across the Soviet bloc – the fallout from the death of Stalin, the end of the Korean war, the 17 June uprising, Lavrentii Beria's arrest in Moscow, defeat of the Herrnstadt–Zaisser group, and so on. Why this four-month delay occurred is difficult to say. It could simply be that the wheels of bureaucracy were slow to turn, or that the ZPKK was distracted by its investigation of a bigger target, Dahlem, who was suspended from all party functions on 17 March and then formally removed from the Politburo and the Central Committee on 6 May over his contacts with Noel Field and his refusal to account for ‘errors’ he had supposedly made while leader of the ‘French emigration’ group in 1939–40.Footnote ⁴⁰

Mario Keßler has also argued that any East German show trial, while likely to have involved several prominent Jewish western exiles, including Eisler, as the co-accused, could not realistically have followed the Czechoslovaks in having a Jew as the principal defendant; less than ten years after the end of the Holocaust this would have been counterproductive in propaganda terms and in particular would have cast doubt on the regime's high-profile commitment to ‘anti-fascism’. Merker and Dahlem, both non-Jewish Westemigranten, were therefore the more obvious candidates for the lead role in any such show trial, not least because they were, or had been, potential rivals of Ulbricht in power struggles taking place in the top echelons of the KPD/SED since the 1930s. Indeed, it was these two figures that the ZPKK and its Soviet advisers clearly began to concentrate on in the early months of 1953.Footnote ⁴¹ By contrast, the delayed timing and overall circumstances of his interrogation make it unlikely that Kuczynski was ever intended as the primary victim of an East German show trial. Even so, he may well have been marked out for inclusion in an additional – and related – tier of potential defendants, if not by Ulbricht then by Matern, encouraged by Koenen, or by one of the Soviet political advisers in Berlin.Footnote ⁴²

A second point to note is that, surprisingly, given the background of the Slánský trial, questions about Zionism and ‘US imperialism’ did not crop up directly in Kuczynski's interrogation. True, he was asked briefly about his pre-war encounters with Simone in London and his wartime contacts with Zilliacus, who – although not Jewish himself – had become a prominent supporter of the Zionist cause within the Labour party in Britain in the late 1940s.Footnote ⁴³ But, interestingly, neither Merker nor Frejka was mentioned by name. Instead, it is clear that the interrogators were looking for evidence of ideological deviation in the last two years of the war (‘hattest Du nicht auch eine falsche Linie gehabt?’) as a means of manipulating Kuczynski's political biography and thus providing evidence of a motive for spying for the west or of helping the United States to recruit new agents in its war against communism. Thus three issues in particular emerged.

Firstly, there was the question of why Kuczynski had been voted out of the party leadership in London in July 1944, and why the party threatened to bring disciplinary proceedings against him in autumn 1944 because of the above-mentioned article on European reconstruction published in Left News. Here Kuczynski defended himself robustly, arguing that ‘on the most important issue: confidence in the working class, I took the correct line’.Footnote ⁴⁴ By contrast his opponents had adopted what he deemed to be the ‘Ehrenburg–Vansittart’ view which was rooted in too pessimistic a vision of Germany's future, and which, he hinted, was too much influenced by Czech anti-German views. As for the article in Left News, it had been approved in advance by the British party, which took precedence over the German exile party when it came to international questions. The British party had then ordered the German exile group to cease disciplinary proceedings against him and the matter was dropped. Besides, Kuczynski continued, Left News was not a ‘Trotskyist’ paper but ‘politically entirely on our side’ [politisch ganz nach uns orientiert]. In 1944 several CPGB members had also contributed articles to it. For all of these reasons, he still felt in 1953 that he had no cause for self-criticism in this matter.Footnote ⁴⁵

The second line of questioning related to an earlier disagreement in the London KPD group, in January 1944, concerning the ‘correct’ response to resolutions adopted by the ‘Big Three’ (Josef Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill) at the Teheran conference a month earlier. The most controversial of these related to Germany's post-war eastern borders, with Churchill and Roosevelt conceding Stalin's request that Poland be compensated for the loss of eastern territories to the Soviet Union by extending its western border at Germany's expense. One group inside the London leadership – describing themselves as ‘internationalists’ – proposed to send a telegram to Moscow congratulating the Soviet leadership on this decision. However, Kuczynski had opposed this on the grounds that ‘it would threaten the chances of the resistance fighters in Germany if we were to endorse these new borders’.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was put to him by his interrogators that he had in effect demanded a restoration of the 1937 borders at the expense of Poland and the Soviet Union, a rather dangerous allegation in 1953, particularly given West Germany's ongoing refusal to recognise the Oder–Neiße line as the new post-1945 frontier between Poland and (East) Germany.

Once again Kuczynski rigorously defended himself, in contrast to his friend Kahn, who apparently agreed that he had made a ‘false decision’ in this regard. For Kuczynski there was no doubt that ‘we were completely correct’ in refusing to send the telegram, as it would have undermined German resistance to Hitler. On the other hand, he rigorously denied having instigated any resolutions against the Teheran decisions which could have been of use to ‘anti-Soviet elements’.Footnote ⁴⁷ He could not vouch for the FDB in this respect, because unlike Kahn he had not been a member, but he was also ‘100% convinced’ that it too would not have knowingly acted against Soviet interests.Footnote ⁴⁸ Finally he denied that it was because of disputes over Teheran that he and Kahn had been forced out of the London party leadership – rather it was because of disagreements which began earlier, in summer 1943, and which carried on to summer 1944. These disagreements were not about Teheran or about German nationalism in a narrow sense, but about ‘our stance towards the German people and the German working class’, and here Kuczynski again insisted that he had been ‘strategically right’ to oppose the ‘Ehrenburg–Vansittartist’ line of his opponents.Footnote ⁴⁹

The third line of questioning, and possibly the most threatening, related to Kuczynski's contacts with the Americans, both during a fund-raising tour which he undertook to Washington DC and New York on behalf of the party in 1938, and during his work as a statistician for the US Strategic Bombing Survey between September 1944 and September 1945. In March 1945 the latter task took him from London to Paris, then from Strasbourg into the US military zone of Germany, and finally to Berlin. Of particular interest to the interrogators were Kuczynski's activities in Paris, where he vouched for Erich Henschke (party name ‘Castro’), a German–Jewish communist and Spanish civil war veteran who also worked for Soviet military intelligence in Britain during the war. In particular, he had been given permission by Moscow to make contact with Joseph Gould, a London-based representative of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and to recruit German communists for subversive operations behind enemy lines in Western Europe. Henschke had also been in Paris at the same time as Kuczynski in early 1945; both men, and in particular Kuczynski, were suspected of allowing approximately forty insufficiently vetted German communists to be recruited into the OSS via Gould, some of whom, it was alleged, had later been turned into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spies and operatives.Footnote ⁵⁰

Kuczynski's response was again to come out fighting. He had not worked for the OSS, but for the US Strategic Bombing Survey. They had approached him after reading his book on the conditions of German workers under fascism, which he had written using statistical material publicly available at the Wiener library in London.Footnote ⁵¹ Before accepting their offer of employment, he had secured the approval of the ‘friends’ in Moscow (via his sister) and of the German and English parties. Later Moscow praised his work as useful to them.Footnote ⁵² The fact that he was given the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the US army had more to do with salary than anything else; to all intents and purposes he had remained a civilian.Footnote ⁵³ He had not approved of recruiting German communists for United States-led special military operations in Western Europe, and had taken no direct part in this, other than carrying out an order from Moscow to put Gould in touch with the German party in London, which had subsequently nominated ‘Castro’ as its link man.Footnote ⁵⁴ Furthermore, he had gone to France in early 1945 solely because of his work with the Strategic Bombing Survey, and for no other reason. However, once there he did vouch for ‘Castro’ as reliable in dealings with Paris-based German communists such as Otto Niebergall, the KPD's chief representative in the Free German Movement in France. This is because he knew ‘Castro’ was reliable through his and his sister's contacts with the Soviet ‘friends’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Finally, it is important to note Kuczynski's reaction to being interrogated more generally. The tone of the interrogation was aggressive and the questions asked made it clear that this was not simply another routine enquiry into western exiles of the kind that had already taken place in 1949–50. Rather, it was aimed at forcing Kuczynski to implicate himself or others in serious charges of spying; this could then be turned into an indictment. Kuczynski was also told in no uncertain terms that the investigation was focused on his relations with the OSS in particular, and had been directly approved by Ulbricht and the rest of the Politburo.Footnote ⁵⁶ He in turn seemed to recognise the seriousness of the situation. Early on in the interview he admitted: ‘Of course there were [western] agents [in the London exile group]. It would be strange if there hadn't been.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet he was reluctant to point any fingers. As far as his former supporters were concerned, namely Kahn and Grete Wittkowski, he was quite certain they were not spies. Yet equally he was confident of the party loyalty of his arch-enemy Hager. His reasoning here is interesting, and indeed rather damning towards Hager:

And on Koenen, the man who had denounced him, he was equally damning, but likewise convinced that he was not a spy: ‘To be frank, he is too much of a sly fox to do anything like that.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Kuczynski was less sure about Schrecker and Heinz Schmidt, and even had some second thoughts about Koenen. However, his doubts about them were probably more due to their supposed anti-German/pro-Czech views than to concrete suspicions based on their wartime links to Zilliacus or other supposed British agents; as he admitted to the interrogators, Zilliacus had provided useful support for the German group: ‘He was one of the few people on the left of the Labour party. He had held a prominent position in the League of Nations [before the war]. He was somebody we turned to for various ends.’Footnote ⁶⁰

IV.

What, then, was the outcome and significance of the ZPKK's various investigations into the ‘English emigration’ group? In February 1954 Schrecker, who had already been arrested on 24 November 1952 on trumped-up charges relating to his past dealings with ‘unreliable’ Czech contacts, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the catch-all offence of ‘endangering peace through militarist propaganda’. At the time of his arrest he was subjected to serious antisemitic abuse by his Stasi interrogators and was later described by a member of the ZPKK investigation team as ‘a flagrant English spy’ (ein schwerer englischer Spion).Footnote ⁶¹ He was released in June 1956 and re-admitted to the party later that year.Footnote ⁶² Heinz Schmidt, who had already been transferred from his position as head of Berlin radio to a lowly post in Mecklenburg in October 1949 because of ‘nationalist chauvinism’,Footnote ⁶³ was investigated again by the ZPKK in 1953. During his interrogation on 8 August, he named Kuczynski as the most likely spy in the ‘English emigration’, but this did not do him any good, and he remained in disgrace until 1955.Footnote ⁶⁴ His unpublished memoirs, written for the party in 1979, show that he continued to see the arguments with Kuczynski in 1943–4 over the future of Germany as a significant moment in the history of the wartime London KPD group. In particular he rejected the ‘Vansittartist’ label and also disputed the claim that Ulbricht and Pieck had given retrospective approval to Kuczynski's minority ‘pro-German’ position, pointing out, correctly, that Merker's two-volume book, Deutschland: Sein oder Nicht Sein?, was never published in the Soviet Occupation Zone or the GDR.Footnote ⁶⁵ He also reiterated his support for the Oder–Neiße line, which he considered necessary to protect the Soviet Union from (West) German revanchism, and even defended Ehrenburg, whose anti-German articles had served a vital propagandistic function during the war: ‘They were written for the Soviet soldiers and were intended to dispel the dangerous illusion that they were fighting against class-conscious German proletarians with whom they should fraternise.’Footnote ⁶⁶

Koenen, who had likewise sought to frame Kuczynski, was himself denounced by candidate Politburo member Elli Schmidt because in the late 1940s, while living in Dresden and serving as co-chairman of the SED in Saxony, he and his wife Emmy Damerius-Koenen ‘were often in Prague’ and usually returned with ‘handsome gifts’ and tales of meetings with former friends from the Czech exile group in Britain.Footnote ⁶⁷ He was not expelled from the party or the Central Committee, but in May 1953 he received a ‘severe reprimand’ for his ‘lack of vigilance’ in respect to his Albanian contacts.Footnote ⁶⁸ His unpublished memoirs, dictated for the party in the late 1950s, were less detailed about Kuczynski than Heinz Schmidt; nonetheless he accused him of having worked hand in hand with Merker to undermine him in 1940–2 (when he was briefly interned in Britain and Canada) and again in 1943–4 (when he became a leading figure in the FDB).Footnote ⁶⁹ Meanwhile, the only two senior figures from the ‘English emigration’ who survived the investigation of 1953 completely unscathed were those who, on the face of it, were the most likely purge victims: Kuczynski and Hager.Footnote ⁷⁰

In the absence of hard evidence, one can only speculate as to the reasons why they were not purged. In Kuczynski's case, he was probably protected first and foremost through his own and his sister's work for the ‘friends’ in Moscow.Footnote ⁷¹ This involved, among other things, passing on classified information obtained from the Strategic Bombing Survey in 1944–5, including the fortnightly estimates of Germany's current rate of armaments production.Footnote ⁷² It was also fortunate for him that the Czech–Zilliacus connection was more damaging to his former enemies in the London KPD group – not only Koenen, Heinz Schmidt and Schrecker, but Hager, who had written a pamphlet in English in 1946 on the formation of the SED and had arranged for Zilliacus to write the foreword.Footnote ⁷³ Kuczynski's decision to stand his ground on the issues raised in the interrogation, and his refusal – like Merker and Schrecker – to make any false confessions or to engage in the kind of destructive self-criticism which might have been used to build up a case against him, also undoubtedly helped. Finally, there was probably an element of luck here too – by late July 1953, with the announcement of the ‘new course’, the 17 June uprising and the arrest of Beria a month earlier, the East German leadership found that it no longer had Soviet backing for a major show trial, and all preparations were subsequently called to a halt.Footnote ⁷⁴

Meanwhile, Hager, who had been closely associated with Schrecker and Heinz Schmidt during the war, and whose wife Sabina (Bim) was Jewish, seems to have avoided having further suspicions raised against him as a western émigré, even though he had been mildly critical of Ulbricht at a Central Committee meeting on 21 June 1953.Footnote ⁷⁵ Kuczynski was also not recalled for interview after 20 July 1953, or at least there are no records of this in the party archive.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even those who had allegedly plotted to remove Ulbricht as party general secretary in early July 1953, Herrnstadt and Wilhelm Zaisser, were simply expelled from the party and did not have charges pressed against them. The trials of Schrecker in 1954 and Merker in 1955 were held in secret – before the district court in Karl-Marx-Stadt and the GDR supreme court in East Berlin respectively – and did not, in the end, involve a wider circle of alleged conspirators; both were quietly released and (only) partially rehabilitated in 1956.Footnote ⁷⁷

Perhaps more interesting, though, is to examine the way in which Kuczynski and Hager dealt with this period of uncertainty and even danger in their lives when it came to writing their memoirs in subsequent decades. Both went on after 1953 to establish important careers in the GDR, Kuczynski as a leading academic and public intellectual, and Hager as the Politburo member responsible for ideological questions. Both lived to a ripe old age and published lengthy memoirs in the 1990s. And both went out of their way to attack each other; indeed there was no love lost between them. In Kuczynski's estimation, Hager was a ‘careerist’;Footnote ⁷⁸ he was loyal to the party but he had no moral or political sense and often showed a preference for crude propaganda – such as that produced by Ehrenburg during the war – over a properly developed, critical, Marxist–Leninist world-view.Footnote ⁷⁹ Another example from a later period would be Hager's famous interview with the West German magazine Stern in April 1987 in which he denied that the GDR needed reforms along the lines of glasnost and perestroika (‘when one's neighbour starts changing the wallpaper, one does not necessarily feel obliged to do the same’).Footnote ⁸⁰ After the interview was published, Kuczynski was the only prominent East German party member publicly to distance himself from what he privately described as this ‘brazen’ (unverschämtes) attack on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁸¹ Hager, on the other hand, believed that Kuczynski lacked the strength of character to admit that he was sometimes wrong; self-criticism was of course considered to be incumbent on all party members. He also defended his own position in the London exile group, angrily denying that he had ever been a ‘Vansittartist’ and insisting that his membership of the FDB and his articles in Freie Tribüne in 1943–4 proved otherwise.Footnote ⁸²

In spite of this, both Hager and Kuczynski had surprisingly similar approaches to the Stalin era. Both admitted that injustices had been done, Kuczynski going as far as to describe the purges of the early 1950s as the work of ‘criminals’,Footnote ⁸³ and Hager referring to them as a ‘dark chapter in the history of the GDR’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Both expressed regret that they had not done more to speak out, but claimed that to have done so would only have meant loss of party membership, or worse still, arrest.Footnote ⁸⁵ And both conceded that the suspicions raised against western émigrés, the ‘constant demands for vigilance’ and the ‘fear of spies’ had all had a negative impact on the ‘inner life’ of the party more generally.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet in spite of this, neither could admit that they themselves had been in considerable danger. Nor could they admit that Ulbricht had deliberately worked with Soviet advisers to initiate show trial preparations against leading western émigrés in 1952–3, and that he had been willing to use antisemitic prejudice as a means of securing his hold on power.Footnote ⁸⁷

Of course the evidence we have today points in a different direction. There was, as Grieder and others have convincingly shown, a ‘strong anti-Semitic element in the purge of Merker’ and other western émigrés such as Schrecker from the ranks of the SED after 1950, a purge also ‘carried out in an atmosphere of paranoia flowing from the highly charged international atmosphere in the early 1950s’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Kuczynski case too contained clear traces of this Zweckantisemitismus,Footnote ⁸⁹ at least at the time of its inception in the feverish weeks following the Slánský trial and the Moscow Doctors’ Plot in 1952–3. Even so, it is important to keep this in perspective. Kuczynski was targeted for a variety of reasons; alongside his Jewishness his known wartime contacts with the Americans and his tendency to think critically and outside the party line were equally, if not more important. Like the former (and future) communist party leader in Poland, Władysław Gomułka, he was also singled out because of his supposedly ‘nationalistic’ and ‘deviationist’ views which were held to be at odds with communist ‘internationalism’ and post-war Soviet interests.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, while the Slánský trial is clearly relevant, it is also significant that Kuczynski's eventual interrogation in July 1953 did not refer explicitly to Merker or Zionism but instead focused on his alleged work for the OSS. The antisemitic/anti-Zionist campaigns in East Berlin orchestrated by Ulbricht and Matern in the first half of 1953 were thus only one part of a complex and fast-changing picture, although they are no less reprehensible for that. In view of this, it is also correct not to conflate the situation in East Germany in 1953 with that in Czechoslovakia in 1952; there were many overlaps here but the dynamics and eventual outcome were different, perhaps also owing to the East Germans’ greater sensitivity to accusations of racism as a result of the Holocaust and related Nazi war crimes.

Finally, the Kuczynski case also sheds new light on the relative importance of (false) denunciations as opposed to self-incrimination and manipulation of personal biographies in determining the outcome of the purges, at least in the East German context. On the one hand, the ZPKK's interrogation of Kuczynski and other former London exiles was clearly no knee-jerk reaction to one random and malicious denunciation, but a deliberate, if rather clumsy attempt to persuade a group of senior party members to implicate themselves or others on serious charges of spying. It failed partly because the main target, Kuczynski, refused to play ball and partly because of changing external factors, in particular the different signals emanating from Moscow after July 1953. Yet it is equally clear that the western émigrés themselves, through denouncing each other and making their own use of anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual and anti-Czech stereotypes, also contributed to the suspicions raised against them.Footnote ⁹¹ Together with the fabricated confessions beaten out of the Slánský trial victims, they gave weight to the falsehood that a western spy ring had existed in the London KPD during the war.